Resource How to Write or Talk About Your Research Outside the Ivory Tower

Making your research accessible to a broad audience is not an exercise in trivializing it or ‘dumbing it down’, but challenges you to consolidate your ideas and research discoveries so they can be presented concisely to a non-specialist audience. This seemingly simple act is actually very powerful--building trust between experts and the communities their research impacts. Instead of your academic pursuits sitting in the ivory tower or buried in a journal article, your ideas and accomplishments are presented for everyone to understand and get excited about! Here are some tips to help you bring your research out of the ivory tower and into the public sphere. 

Know your audience. People are not blank slates ready for you to impart information on them. They come in with their own experiences, knowledge, and thoughts on the topic. Learn who your audience is before you put your talk or article together. If you are giving a talk and you cannot find this out, it’s OK to ask your audience questions to gauge their prior knowledge. An example from my own research that I use with audiences is to show them 5 images lettered A-E and ask the audience to raise their hand if they think image A is a galaxy and so on. If they get it right, then I don’t have to explain what a galaxy is before getting into why I’m studying them. It also gets at misinformation in popular media where they show images of nebula and say they are galaxies.  

Know your goal. There are many reasons you may be in a situation where you have to explain your work to someone: job talks, public presentations, a social gathering with new people, conferences, speaking to your government representatives. You will have a specific goal for having this conversation in each of these situations. You are looking to get hired through a job talk. You are looking to get people interested in what you do and ask questions at social gatherings. You are looking to bring awareness to your research in public presentations. You are looking to network at conferences. You are looking to change something when meeting with your representatives. The more specific your goal, the better. 

Identify the one thing you want the audience to take away. You usually come away from a movie or book with the themes and scenes that stick with you. People aren’t very good at remembering details. Before writing up your talk, identify the one thing you want someone to take away from your talk. If 10 minutes after your talk, their friend called and asked ‘Hey what was that talk about?’ What would you want their response to be? That takeaway should be central to your talk or article. 

Interact with your audience. You may have been taught at some point to look above people’s heads when you’re speaking to a large crowd. This is not a good practice. It is more effective to slowly scan the audience's faces and every now and then rest on a friendly one. I like to pick people who are smiling or seem very engaged in my talk. This can often help with nervousness as well. Another way to interact with your audience is to ask questions and actively listen to their responses by finding some way to incorporate them into your talk. Audiences are much more engaged when they feel like they’re actively participating in the presentation. 

Use active voice. As academics, we write passively. We are never the protagonist doing the research. The answers are there waiting to be discovered. This does not make for engaging content. Using an active voice is one of the hardest things for academics to do when speaking or writing for a general audience. Using an active voice means that the subject of your sentences is performing the action. For example, the sentence underlined above is a passive sentence. If we wanted to make it active, we could rewrite it as ‘We discovered the answers.’ There are online tools that can help you identify passive voice. One of our favorites is the Passive Voice Detector. You can copy and paste any text into this web tool and it will tell you if you’re using active or passive voice. It also demonstrates an on-the-fly method you can use if you’re not online. By clicking on the orange biohazard symbol, you can ‘summon the zombies’ which provides a quick way to identify if your sentence is passive. Going back to the example underlined above, if we add ‘by zombies’ to the end of our sentence we see that it still makes grammatical sense. But zombies aren’t doing your research. You are! You don’t want to leave that up for debate! 

Use short sentences. Have you ever reached the end of a sentence in an article or book and realized you don’t remember what the sentence is about? So, you go back and re-read the sentence. Long sentences can lose a reader (or listener). Keeping your sentences short and to the point will keep your audience engaged. Run-on sentences or sentences that need lots of commas or semicolons are too much for people to hold in their brains until the point is made. A good gauge of sentence length is to type out what you want to say in a document, if it goes over two full lines of text, you can consider breaking the sentence up. There are also online tools that can help you identify run-on sentences such as Sentence Checker or Grammarly. 

Remove jargon. Jargon is specific terminology used in a field or within an in-group. Jargon can be easily understood by people who work in that particular field. However, the word is unrecognizable or means something different to people outside of the field. An example of this is the word theory. In physics, a theory is an established scientific law. It has been tested and can make predictions. The Theory of Relativity is an established scientific law and is why your GPS works. In everyday conversation though, the word theory has a different meaning. When someone says ‘I have a theory’ you understand that to mean they have a guess or hypothesis. So physicists must be careful when using the word theory to explain their research in everyday conversation. Identifying jargon comes with practice and experience. There are lots of online tools that can help you identify uncommon or field-specific words. XKCD Simple Writer compares your writing with 10,000 commonly used words in the English language. It then highlights the uncommon words. Readable and De-jargonizer also identify jargon and give the writing a score on its accessibility to a general audience.  

Use analogies. Analogies are a great way to connect with audiences. An analogy is a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based. A common analogy is the similarity between the heart and a pump. This paints a picture in the audiences’ mind of the heart pumping blood throughout the body. It is also a way to bring everyone to the same level of understanding. A spectrum is an example of jargon that is also complicated to explain. By using the analogy of a rainbow, you can show the audience what a spectrum is by giving them something they are familiar with to reference. You can then skip right into what you learn from the ‘rainbows’ you are studying. 

Tell a story. There are many elements of your research that could use to craft into a story. All good stories have the following: 

• Characters – these can be objects you are studying, yourself, equipment you’re using, or people impacted by your work. 

• Setting – where is your research happening? In a lab, in space, in the ocean, in your neighborhood? 

• Motivation – what is motivating your characters? Is it a biological process? Is it money? Is it survival? 

• Conflict or a turning point – all good stories have either a conflict or a point where everything comes together or changes. 

• How will it end? - this doesn’t have to have a definitive answer yet (that’s why you’re doing research) but you should have some idea or hint as to how it will end. 

Answer these questions for your audience. Your overall talk needs to answer the following questions so audience is satisfied: 

• What problem or question are you investigating? 

• What is your hypothesis? 

• What is the solution? 

• Why does it matter to your audience? 

• What benefits could result from answering the question or solving the problem? 

Looking to practice these techniques? Sign up for the Penn 3-Minute Thesis this spring and get one one-on-one feedback and coaching on your talk!