It amazes me that people prepare talks without ever asking this question, but they appear to. At a conference, I'd imagine a graduate-educated person whose specialty is not the same as mine. When I write, I am usually imagining that I am writing for a college-educated person whose degree is not in the sciences. If this is overwhelming, pick somebody in the middle of the ignorance/specialty spectrum to pitch your talk to. Even the specialists spend so much time lost in the weeds in their fields that it benefits them to be reminded of the big picture. To the relatively ignorant, you should at least convey the driving questions behind your work: why should anyone care what different kinds of minerals appear in different places on the surface of another planet? What did you learn, and why does it matter? At the same time, to the well-informed, you should convey how your work has added to or broadened or contradicted what has come before it. Really good speakers are ones who manage to communicate something to everybody in the room, no matter who they are or how much they already know. You can spend a whole conference presentation talking about TLAs to an audience of incredibly intelligent people but if they don't know what a TLA is, it's likely you won't have communicated a danged thing. Please note that I am not speaking of intelligence here. You do have to identify the circle containing the people who already possess the necessary contextual knowledge that will permit them to understand everything you are telling them, and recognize the fact that some people who are there will not understand everything. What about Mars atmospheric scientists attending your talk? What do they know? What about graduate students? What if an asteroid astronomer wanted to try to find out what's going on at Mars? What about impact crater experimentalists? What about a space journalist? A NASA administrator? A high school earth science teacher? Their students? The conference venue's A/V technician? You can widen your circle ad infinitum.Īt some point, you do have to stop. On the other hand, people who study Martian geomorphology from orbit know what CRISM is but may lack your ability to instantly mentally translate a mineral name to its chemical formula, and they might lack the background knowledge of the kind of sedimentary environments that typically produce the mineral.Īnd we're still talking about pretty specialized Mars scientists here. Mineralogists who do not study Mars will understand the significance of mineral names, but they may not know what a CRISM is or what it does or what its resolution is or what its other limitations are or where clay minerals have and haven't been found on Mars. Widen the circle a bit more to take in other kinds of geologists, though, and you begin to run into trouble. Widen that circle a little bit to the people doing the same kind of work in your field, and you don't have to change your language very much. You and your coauthors and/or advisors are a very tiny circle. I usually think of this in terms of widening circles within your audience. Let's take a specific example: let's say your work concerns using the CRISM imaging spectrometer on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to map clay and sulfate minerals on Mars and that you are using your maps to infer things about Mars' geologic history. If you do not provide the people in your audience with information that they require in order to understand you, it is the same as telling them that you do not care if they understand you or not. It is an act of disrespect to your audience. Deleting necessary context from your talk in order to present more of what you did cuts out large swaths of audience. The wider an audience you are addressing, the more contextual information you will need to provide to them. But if you actually want people in the room to learn anything from you, you need to think about who they are and what they will come in to the room knowing and not knowing. Perhaps that's all you care about, in which case you can stop reading this post right now. Most scientists at conferences appear to be speaking to themselves, or, perhaps, to the people who will eventually be reviewing their paper. Here are some questions to guide you in preparing a good talk. Work to deliver them a presentation that is designed for them, to inform and interest them in your work, to leave them pleased that they spent that 5 or 10 or 50 minutes of their valuable time listening to you. All those people in that room in front of you: they are not you.
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