Tips for Science Communication
by Joaquín Capablo Sesé
The MCAA has initiated a series of webinars that run each second Friday of the month starting from December 2021. The aim is to provide educational webinars to the MCAA members and non-members as a way to thank them for the support received all these years. The webinars are co-organised by the Communication WG in collaboration with a different MCAA Chapter or Working Group each month and cover a variety of topics.
In the 9th episode of the MCAA Around the World series, organized by the Communication WG, the focus was set on a very important topic: Science Communication!
Here we will summarize the highlights of the 9th Episode of the MCAA Around the World Webinar Series (Watch the full webinar here — YouTube).
Sometimes in your life, you have the opportunities to listen to outstanding speakers. And the webinar of Elodie Chabrol, PhD, @EloScicomm, represents a clear example of it. In this episode, the topic was Science Communication, with the exceptional speaker giving us many interesting tips to improve the dissemination of our research.
Moreover, in the last part of the session, she gave us some insights on how to use Twitter efficiently!
First of all, who is our speaker?
Let’s get to know her a little better: Elodie obtained her PhD in Neurogenetics in Paris and while pursuing research as a postdoc at UCL, London she got involved in the creation of the Pint of Science festival in 2013. She created the French branch in 2014 and after years of working in research and Pint of Science simultaneously, she decided to become a full-time science communicator.
She is now the international director for Pint of Science and is also involved in various science communication projects as a freelancer. She is passionate about helping scientists share their love of science with the public. Her mission is to make science accessible to everyone, everywhere. In April 2021 she edited a comprehensive guide to Science Communication:
https://downloads.hindawi.com/scicomm-guide.pdf
More info about #Elodie at:
https://www.elodiechabrol.com/
From her wide experience, Elodie brought us six tips to consider when you are thinking about launching a science communication event:
1. Know your audience:
The best rule for good science communication is to always analyze the potential audience in advance:
- Who are you talking to and who do you want to talk to?
- Why are they there? Why do they listen to you?
As Elodie highlighted, there is no general public as one thing, so she started a dialogue with the audience of the webinar with the following questions:
- Who has already done science communication?
- What is your favorite format? Which one do you enjoy the most?
- Why is science communication important?
In this way, she applied her proposed tip in her own talk. As a result, she discovered that 94.12% of the online participants had previous experience doing SciComm. And from a Word cloud generated from some answers she could see that the favorite formats of the audience were podcasts, YouTube (Ted talks), live events (Pint of Science), games, social media (Twitter) and reading books or magazines.
The participants of the talk also emphasized the reasons why science communication is important to them: it translates knowledge to society, increases awareness about the effort, time and money needed in research and opens the doors for trust. In a nutshell, science is not finished until it’s communicated.
2. Think about your message:
The key point of this tip comes from the answers of the following questions:
- Which is the take home message you want for your audience?
- What do you want them to remember when arriving at home?
3. Tell a story:
When creating the narrative, Elodie remarks to avoid being boring by listing discoveries.
Which strategies can you use instead? Three of her suggestions were adding a personal touch, showing your passion or explaining the topic from different angles.
4. Avoid Jargon
Two noteworthy citations in this point:
“Word matters: Jargon alienates readers” (Nature): Non-scientists feel shut out and confused by articles that use technical language — even if it’s defined.
“Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers” (New York Times)
The message is then clear: the use of jargon can result in losing the attention of the audience. Sometimes, the difficulty of jargon is also that the meaning is different from normal use of the word. Furthermore, the use of jargon in congresses and conferences usually is creating a barrier between you and other researchers. Then, the best approach here would be to reduce it to a minimum. How to do it? For example, by means of a DE-JARGONIZER tool, in which you can discover which of the words of your research could be difficult for the public.
Other available tool would be the up-goer five text editor, in which you can only use the thousand most used words in English! Try to explain your research using it! Consider that even rocket science could be explained with it!
5. Make it relatable
Try to make analogies of your work data with normal everyday things. For example, if you work with crazy distances, you can compare a long distance as the earth to moon separation, or a small one to the size of a hair.
Moreover, when possible, try to explain your research in a fun and engaging way: please imagine DNA in a cell as 30 km spaghetti in a tennis ball! And if you find one of these analogies working well, please do not hesitate to reuse it!
6. Be visual
Last but not least, be as friendly as possible with your audience. As a general rule, one slide, one idea. And then try to show science as much as you can, always making sure that everything on the slides is understandable.
You can even bring items from the lab, things people can touch and see, or pictures of the lab (they probably do not get there very often). Showing the picture of a room full of microscopes before showing the photos made by the microscope could help the audience to understand the context of the research better.
If you are thinking about starting with science communication, Elodie also described some selfish reasons to do it. You can make your science more relevant, sharing your love for science, increasing your visibility and engaging people by showing them what you do. And you are going to be a better scientist if you can communicate your science.
You may also get jobs you would not have gotten if you are not doing science communication. Nowadays, for instance, more grants are available for science communication, with a required plan for science communication in the projects.
The first steps in science communication activities could be done by joining an initiative of others institutions, among others:
Lecturers without borders (originally from France): they organize a talk at your destination (in a school or somewhere else), you can contact them when traveling to another country.
Dance your PhD competition: You can record yourself with doing a choreography about your research.
Soap box science, a novel public outreach platform for promoting women and non-binary scientists and the science they do.
I am scientist, get me out of here: a chat with a scientist (no video) and they vote for the best scientist at the end.
Mind the lab, starting in Greece, having science in the tube during few days.
Science scaling and tactile universe, created by an astrophysicist not seeing well, for blind or not seeing well people with 3D printings to discover galaxies and the universe with their touch. It is important to make science accessible to people that could probably not access to it otherwise.
Science ceilidh, a Scottish gathering with music and dance (gaelic). Whay do not enter by their tradition to actually talk about science? Try to create something that has their interest at heart, try to melt science with tradition.
For science communication the sky is the limit. You can be as creative as you want and try to reach everyone. It is suggested to start by something that feels ok, that is, start by something you enjoy. In order to reduce the stress and be more confident during the talk it could be useful to think in advance how do you behave in a talk and also be in the room of the talk before to check everything is working right.
Once you control it, you can challenge yourself. Then one day will arrive in which, as Elodie explains, a magic moment happens, with the public reacting while understanding your points (it will probably become some kind of drug for you!).
Another remarkable point to pay attention to is that in science communication words make up only 7% of the message. All the rest (93%!) comes from the body language (Non-verbal communication: Face, posture, movements and paralinguistic) and the tone of voice (make emphasis to the important topics)!
The second part of the talk was dedicated to #Twitter. As before, Elodie started with a dialogue with the audience: “are you using Twitter?”
The possible answers were:
1. Yes
2. No
3. Hell no!
After this preliminary feedback, Elodie gave us some reasons why we should use Twitter, as a great way to share or to find out interesting information for you (workshops, fundings, papers…) by using threads or to create a network (public and private lists are useful here). Elodie also showed us how to pick up information from your account by using the Altmetric tool, an amazing tool for reports too. For Elodie, it is important to have a nice bio with links, to make sure that if someone finds you they would follow you. You can have different accounts depending on the purpose (professional, personal…).
Her 10 tips for using Twitter like a pro were:
- Having a well written bio
- 280 characters maximum
- Be as clear as possible
- Use threads
- Use Hashtags
- Use Links: to share more information
- Use Photo, gif and video
- Planification
- Do not start a tweet with ‘@’
- Use Lists
In summary, an outstanding talk from an outstanding speaker! If you missed the webinar (or if you want to see again) you can find it at the MCAA Youtube’s channel:
About the Author:
Joaquín Capablo Sesé, PhD. MSCA Project manager (Iberus Experience) at Campus Iberus and Chair of the MCAA Spain-Portugal Chapter
