Presenting Science Concisely (eBook)

Dr Bruce Kirchoff is a Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). He has won the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Charles Edwin Bessey Teaching Award from the Botanical Society of America, and the Innovations in Plant Systematics Education Prize from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. He studied scientific communication at the Alan Alda Center, storytelling with North Carolina storyteller Louise Kessel, and is a member of the Soylent Greensboro improv group.

If you can communicate your science in short, you can do it in long. But not vice-versa. Learning to give short research presentations is a fundamental skill for anybody who wants to be exceptional at science communication, and Bruce has written here one of the best guides to boosting exactly that skill.

Presenting Science Concisely is a great resource for any scientists who want to better communicate their latest research findings and efforts to the general public. The book offers a detailed, yet digestible, overview of how to talk about your research in a way that is relevant to the everyday lives of readers and listeners.

Communication centers will benefit from having Presenting Science Concisely on hand as a reference for working with science communicators as well as for purposes of staff training... Scientists will come to realize that effective audience adaptation does not mean watering down the science but rather putting it into a narrative format that will pique listeners' curiosities and become more memorable.

The two cornerstones of the book are (1) the art of presenting science through storytelling and transforming the story into a play of three or more acts, and (2) a focus on knowing and reaching the author's audience. The chapters on posters are particularly useful, as they include a detailed discussion (and examples) of titles and bring in cognitive psychological principles, as EyeQuant technology to track visual movement on the poster. The illustrations, created in color for the book by Jon Wagner, are at once whimsically humorous and totally to the point of the discussion in the text. I recommend this book to anyone who works as a biological scientist and presents research results to a variety of audiences..

The book of Bruce Kirchoff, nicely illustrated by Jon Wagner, presents advanced techniques to communicate better, with focus on lightning talks.
I really enjoyed the first chapter where authors explain the importance of storytelling in science in a post-truth world where social media is used to manipulate beliefs. Observing that the scientific process has the same structure as a story, and that doing science resembles playing music, they recommend that scientists should integrate their analytical and artistic sides because presentations should be simple, surprising, simple and emotional. Telling good stories would in particular help to fight skepticism such as the attacks on climate science.
The book concludes with five rules of behaviour to speak with enthusiasm. Overall, I highly recommend reading this book full of golden nuggets.