Distilling Your Message How to talk about science clearly and engagingly June 7, 2011

1. Distilling Your Message How to talk about science clearly and engagingly June 7, 2011

2. The basics of Distilling • Know your audience • Make sure they understand – that’s your job • Look for common ground • Say what you do and whyit matters • NO jargon. Be conversational. • Have one or two main points – things you want the listener to remember

3. A tip from Steve Martin(in Planes, Trains and Automobiles)

4. Avoid “the curse of knowledge” When you know something very well, it becomes hard to imagine what it would be like not to know it.

5. Beyond the basics • First, engage your listener, then introduce complexity gradually • Use different levels of complexity for different audiences • Tell a story – what’s surprising, exciting, difficult, upsetting, mysterious about your subject • Use examples, anecdotes, analogies

6. What Is anthrax? Bacillus anthracis, the etiologic agent of anthrax, is a large, Gram-positive, nonmotile, spore-forming bacterial rod. The three virulence factors of B. anthracis are edema toxin, lethal toxin and a capsular antigen.” -- CDC website’s FAQ on anthrax, 2001

7. Distilling the Message Anthrax is a disease caused by bacteria. It usually is curable but can be fatal in animals and people.

8. Michael Pollan’s 7-word summary • Eat food • Not too much • Mostly plants

9. Long-term cognitive impairment and functional disability among survivors of severe sepsis Severe sepsis in this older population wasindependently associated with substantial and persistent newcognitive impairment and functional disability among survivors.The magnitude of these new deficits was large, likely resultingin a pivotal downturn in patients' ability to live independently. --Iwashyna et al, 2010, JAMA

10. It can be hard to bounce back If your grandma nearly died from a blood infection, but then pulled through, you’d feel like celebrating. But there may be a catch. Researchers found that many elderly people never bounce back completely from the blood infections called sepsis. Instead they can have increased problems with thinking and physical abilities, so that it’s hard for them to live on their own. Sepsis permanently changes their life.

11. Sustaining Fisheries Yields Over Evolutionary Time Scales Fishery management plans ignore the potential for evolutionary change in harvestable biomass. We demonstrated experimentally that the continual removal of large phenotypes from exploited fish populations leads to the selection of genotypes that code for slower growth thereby reducing population yield and resiliency. Management tools that account for such Darwinian dynamics and preserve natural genetic variation are necessary for long-term sustainable yield. --Conover and Munch, 2002, Science

12. Throw the big ones back? Everyone knows that when you’re fishing, you should throw the small fish back and keep the big ones. Right? Think again. A 5-year experiment shows that, over time, if you keep taking the big fish, the next generations of fish will get smaller. That’s because only smaller fish will remain to become parents, and they tend to have smaller children. With each generation, the children will get smaller and smaller. Eventually, you’ll be left with a fishing hole full of runts.

13. Brian Greene on The Colbert Report

14. “Simplifying” Does Not Mean “Dumbing Down” • You can focus on the meaning, rather the process • You can tell listeners: “This is simplified. It gets more complicated. I can tell you about that if you want to.”

15. “If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself. “ -Attributed to Richard Feynman

16. Thank you!