Scientific Communications Science & The Media

1. Scientific CommunicationsScience & The Media Biology 5700 “Communications Skills” November, 2007 Richard Wassersug

2. Focus today—communications, both with other scientists and the public. This includes popularizing science and scientists’ interaction with the media. I will cover general principles of writing relevant to both technical and non-technical texts. Also I will discuss: • TV and radio interviews. • Oral presentations (e.g., Lectures, Powerpoint and poster presentations). If time permits and there is interest, I can comment on other communication instruments; e.g., grants, progress reports, scientific papers, press releases, curriculum vitae, emails, webpages, letters of reference (e.g., gambits for getting good ones and easy ways to write strong ones).

3. A bit about my background…

4. Let’s start off with some very basic general principles of written communications.

5. General Principles of Writing • Short sentences • Long sentences are always hard to read. • The “three line” rule…. • Short paragraphs • No paragraph should ever be more than a third of a page, single-spaced…leastofallthefirstparagraph. • Long paragraphs can never be reader-friendly. • If possible, use first person and the active, not passive, tense. • Avoid royal “we” if you are the only author.

6. General Principles (cont.) • Use verbs rather than nouns whenever possible; e.g., • “We conclude…” not “Our conclusions are….” • “We observed…” not “Observations were made….” • “These results imply that…” not “One implication of these results is….” TheTrick: Hunt down and kill as many nouns as you can that end in “-ion.” • Avoid a right justified margin unless required to do so. • Use a serif font except in graphs, tables or text of very small font size.

7. Scholarly Publications First rule of writing up research: When you have finished your bench work and have all your data in hand, you are about half way there.

8. Some Relevant Quotes The first draft of anything is always shit. - Ernest Hemingway Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until a drop of blood forms on your forehead. - Douglas Adams All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it. - William Saroyan

9. Publications • Two types: • Peer-reviewed scientific papers. • Popular articles that are not peer-reviewed. • Both are important for communications. • More and more organizations, be they government agencies or private institutions like Dalhousie, seek media coverage and exposure in the popular press.

10. Scientific Publications • The most important fact about your first peer-reviewed publication is that you got it out. The most important fact about your second publication should be that it is better than your first. • Take “Impact Factors” seriously, if you want to be a successful careerist. • Follow the “Directions to Authors” exactly. • Review carefully the sorts of papers published in the targeted journal to make sure that your paper is appropriate for that journal.

11. Scientific Publications (cont.) • Assume “diffusion of responsibility” i.e., the more co-authors you have the less likely any author has read the manuscript carefully. • Make sure that the order of authorship, even if tentative, is established early. • Just because you are working in someone’s lab does not necessarily mean that he/she is or should be a coauthor on your publications. • Have several experts in your field review your papers before they are submitted.

12. Key Principles of Popular Communications • If tax-payers are funding your work, you should be willing and able to tell them: • what you are doing with their money. • why it is important to them. • all in a language they understand. • in a way that can be summarized in two or three sentences.

13. Key Principles (cont.) • Know your audience! • Be it a written or oral presentation, you will not get into trouble if you start with basic information that your audience already knows…unless you fail to ever get to a higher level; i.e, you fail to give them new information.

14. Popularizing your own work Better to start small than not at all. For example, local newsletter, town newspaper, public radio etc. For all established (=$) markets, know the rules for submission: Writer’s Market, magazines’ websites, “agents only” restriction, SASE rules, etc. Acceptable places for scientists to publish pop science without losing credibility are: Nature, New Scientist, American Scientist, Scientific American, Natural History, Smithsonian, the Scientist, Discover, SEED, Psychology Today.

15. Do’s and Don’ts • Avoid jargon and acronyms. • Use pictorial, visual analogies, whenever possible. • When giving talks: • Ask questions of your audience. • Make eye contact. • Repetition is generally good.

16. Jargon & Acronyms • Meant to streamline communications… …but more often simply exclusionary. • Used, for example, in the military and medicine to distinguish insiders from outsiders. • Avoid jargon and acronyms as much as possible in communication with public and the media.

17. Science & the Media • Science and science journalism are not the same. • Science is tedious, repetitive, and boring. • Science journalism is story-telling; science is not. • Engineering, art, architecture, all have more in common with science journalism than with science. • QED: If journalists presented your story in a realistic way, no one would want to read or hear it. Therefore count on media to present your story in an unrealistic fashion. Yet be thankful that they were interested, since overall almost all publicity is good publicity.

18. Science & the Media (cont.) • Do not expect any journalist to show you a draft copy of the story he/she is working on. If they are professional, they won’t do that. • You can say, “Don’t quote me on that” and, if they are professional, they won’t. • You can ask for a chance to answer a question a second time or third time. It doesn’t make them look good, if you don’t sound good. • Expect to be asked why the public should care about your work.

19. Science & the Media (cont.) • Things to do about poor or inaccurate coverage: • Let it go. Rarely will the media publish a correction unless the story is completely and dangerously inaccurate. • Don’t write letters to the editor complaining about their journalists. It will do little good. • Be your own journalist instead. Write up your own research for popular consumption.

20. Science and Television "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Andy Warhol, 1968 “I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’” Andy Warhol, 1979 Television: Fast (i.e., topical), Superficial (i.e., short and quick), Visually interesting (i.e., needs action), Time consuming to produce (i.e., requires lights & sound).

21. What to expect from radio and TV interviews • Good journalists will not tell you ahead of time the exact questions that they plan to ask you simply because they want to avoid getting answers that sound rehearsed and memorized. • But…you can still talk out ahead of time the general areas they wish to explore in an interview.

22. Specific issues about taped interviews • If an interview is being taped ahead of time and you don’t like the way you just answered a question, ask the interviewer to re-ask you the question. • Generally good journalists are happy to do a second and third take. If you sound good, they sound good. And if you sound bad, so does the interviewer.

23. Working with TV crews • The bigger the crew, the longer it will take them to setup for the interview. • If they are interviewing you in your space, you can set the limits on where they can move. You still control the space. • Count on about an hour or more spent for a 30 second sound bite. It can help to know ahead of time how much air time they plan to give your interview. • Count on having something for “show and tell.” TV is all about visuals.

24. Oral Presentations • PowerPoint lectures and presentations. • Poster presentations • What makes a good poster. • How to present a poster.

25. Lectures • Keep classroom and research presentations that are scheduled for an hour to less than a micro-century (~ 52.6 minutes). • Tell people what you are going to tell them, tell it to them, then tell them what you just told them. • Outline your talk at the outset. • End with a “Thank You!” • Anticipate questions and have screens that might answer those questions already on your PowerPoint presentation ready to go after your “thank you”—should the questions actually get asked.

26. Other venues • Public lectures to adults • Talking to school kids • Etc. • I accept virtually all such invitations and encourage you to do so also. • But… • Know your audience, their level of knowledge, their issues, their background…. • Starting point: Assume your audience knows very little.

27. PowerPoint Do’s and Don’ts DO: • Check out the presentation on a projector and not just on your computer screen. • Use large fonts. • Use about one screen per minute. DON’T: • Paraphrase the text on your slide. • Use a background color/pattern that is particularly dark. • Include text that you don’t expect the audience to read. • Over-use animation. More often than not animation is a distraction.

28. PowerPoint Do’s and Don’ts A good PowerPoint presentation can be more than a lecture. Done well, it can be like a orchestra concert where you are the conductor. • Consider your posture and arm movements as part of the performance. • Practice the tempo and dynamics of the presentation. • Be sure to make eye contact with the audience. • Humor is OK, even good at times…but don’t over do it.

29. Posters The fewer the words, the better the poster. The perfect poster is like the card in the pocket in front of you on an airplane; the one that tells you how to get off the plane without using a single word. Assume at the outset that you have too many words, and too small a font on your draft poster. Assume at the outset that no one is going to read your poster, but they may stop by and talk to you about it, if it looks easy to understand and visually attractive.

30. Posters (cont.) Use a block layout; do not let sections flow into each other. Use few fonts and font styles. Limit the citations. People don’t need to see in a poster citations to all the background literature. Include contact info for yourself. Consider: • giving out a small printed version. • including a picture of yourself in the corner. Most of all, use as few words as possible.

31. Manning a poster • Don’t just stand there; offer to explain the poster to any passersby who lingers long enough to start reading the Abstract or Conclusions. • Make it a conversation, not a canned performance. Ask the viewers about their own research interests. Give them time to ask questions. Make sure they are following you. Make sure you can present the whole thing in about six minutes. • Have cards or sheets with your contact info to hand out to anyone who would like additional information.

32. Other topics for consideration?

33. Thank you!

35. Other topics? • Searching for info on the Internet: • Start with long strings. • If looking for an email address, include “email” in the search. • Picking theses projects. If possible… • Have a fall back position. If your first project doesn’t work, what will you do next? • Pick a project for which a negative result is still worth publishing. • Keeping up with the literature: • Table of content dumps, Pubmed, Google scholar etc. • READ!

36. Gambits for getting good letters of reference …i.e., how to sell yourself. • Ask for advice, which is showing respect. • Do this long before you ask specifically for a letter of reference. • Ask advice about what you are considering applying for before you ask for a reference. • Good colleagues expect you to be their equals, not their subordinates. Therefore treat yourself in their presence as an academic equal. Colleagues ask for and provide advice.

37. Letters of Reference • Long letters are strong letters. • They show that the author really knows that candidate. The stronger the part of the letter about how the author knows the candidate, the more weight is given to what is written after that. • Good letters are targeted and confidential, not open generic letters. Non-confidential letters of reference are seen as shallow and weak.

38. Letters of Reference (cont.) • Good letters give strengths and weaknesses. • The make a firm and explicit recommendation at the end and highlight in italics or bold one or two key sentences. • If you request a letter provide a copy of all the material that you are submitting for the position you are applying to.

39. Emails • Keep them short! • The person should be able to figure out why you are writing to him/her within three sentences. • Use an informative subject line. • Include contact info and a link to your webpage.

40. Richard Wassersug, PhD Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. tel. 902-494-2244, cell 902-448-1438, home 902-423-8901 http://www.anatomy.dal.ca/Wassersug/index.htm “The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. .... Your true biologist...may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.” John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) ----------------------------- “If all there was to enlightenment was meditation, then every frog would be a Buddha.” Morpheus Anatomno (undated)