Communicating about science can mean many different things, and there are an endless number of strategies or techniques to consider, but the core fundamentals are quite simple. Communication occurs when two parties successfully exchange information. That means it is a two-way activity — you need to receive feedback from the other party to know if you’ve been successful.

We may feel like we’ve done our part by delivering a presentation or writing an article, but if there isn’t an audience that understood it, we’ve communicated no more than we would by talking aloud to ourselves in an empty room.

Here are five fundamental steps that can ensure we communicate science successfully.

Consider your goals

First, think about what exactly you want to achieve. Do you want to share the results of a specific research project? Secure funding for your proposal? Inspire a young audience to be interested in your field of science? Highlight the humans behind the science? Model the scientific method?

With clear goals, you can make good choices along the way and avoid tangents that muddy the takeaways you think are important.

Audience, audience, audience

Everything you do should be centered on serving the audience. Start with everything you can identify about them. Your audience might be a single family member or a 3rd grade class or a broad mix of social media users. Each of these should lead to a completely different approach, even for the exact same topic.

First, what do you think your audience knows about the topic? What concepts can you pretty safely assume they are already familiar with, and what do you expect will be new to them?

Second, what do you think your audience might care about or find interesting? A 3rd grade class might be very interested in what life in an Antarctic field station is like, but less invested in questions at the bleeding edge of glaciology. The audience at a town meeting on municipal water contamination may be very keen to understand the significance of your chemistry results for their health, but lack patience for your description of the analytical methods you used. Put your focus where their interest is.

And use whatever audience feedback is available to you! Whether you have the opportunity to survey their concerns beforehand, or you can monitor their facial expressions while you talk, or you only have web traffic analytics to review, adapt your communication based on this information.

Pack your bags

Ultimately, communication comes down to a series of decisions of which words and images to use, and which to leave out. You can think of this like packing for a trip. You don’t want to carry unnecessary bulk the whole time, and you don’t want to find yourself without something you desperately need.

This starts with deciding how many ideas you want to include, depending on your goals, the audience, and constraints like time or word count. This is a balancing act — you want to provide value to the audience by communicating as much as possible, but if you overload them you’ll fail to successfully communicate any of it.

Then we come to the pernicious predicament of technical nomenclature characteristic of the vernacular of a particular professional provenance — the problem of jargon. Our goal is to translate our information into a shared language that works for our audience. Sometimes this involves simply substituting a common word with roughly the same meaning as the technical term in our heads. Other times, we need to pick the appropriate level of a concept that meets (but does not exceed) our needs. How specific do I actually need to be to communicate my specific point — “tonalite”, “granite”, “igneous rock”, or “rock”?

Once you pick these terms, use them consistently. It’s much easier to keep track of several new concepts being described to you if you hear the same word each time. Variety might not “keep things interesting” as much as it will make things harder to parse. Minimize the cognitive work you’re asking your audience to perform.

Of course, we generally want to communicate something to the audience that they didn’t already know. Because we’ve been judicious up to this point, we should be able to do that without overwhelming our audience.

There are two ways to think about this. One is the educational concept of scaffolding — the prerequisite knowledge someone needs to understand the concept you’re interested in. If tonalite is a critical concept, then by all means, allocate some of your time or space to explaining what that is. Just don’t bite off more than the audience can chew.

The other aspect of this is context — the knowledge someone needs in order to know how to interpret the information you’ve presented. The audience may not know that a result was surprising if they don’t know what the rest of the evidence has looked like. They may not understand what your conclusions mean for earthquake hazards if they have no frame of reference for your peak ground acceleration numbers. It can be difficult to remember what context the audience may be lacking, but being explicit about your takeaways can help.

Narrative

An excellent strategy to make your communication engaging is to organize it around a narrative. Humans love stories, they capture and hold our attention until we find out how the story ends. Use this to your advantage!

It’s easier to find a narrative than you might think. You don’t need to make it about your personal quest, or about harrowing adventures. The simplest ingredients of a story are a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Another way to describe this is to use the ABT framework. That is, your story begins with a string of “and” statements that set the scene. (Tectonic plates converge in subduction zones AND this produces earthquakes AND we’re monitoring these earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest…) This becomes a story as soon as we add the next element: a “but” statement. (BUT there is something we don’t understand about these earthquakes, which is preventing us from keeping people safer.) The rest of the story is the “therefore”, detailing our attempts to resolve this problem.

It’s the tension created by an obstacle that makes a story into a story, holding our attention. That “but” statement is the hook — the earlier you can put it in front of your audience, the better. This is particularly true in free choice settings like social media where people quickly decide whether they’re interested enough in what you have to say to stop and check it out. In short-form video, for example, you only have a few seconds to provide the hook. Whatever format you’re working in, you want to think carefully about how best to catch your audience’s interest.

Structure

The final planning step is to sketch out our structure. A little outlining can go a long way for effective and clear communication. It organizes your thoughts, ensures you work through the concepts you decided on in a logical progression, and helps you apply your decisions about things like narrative.

A common structure you may want to consider is the inverted pyramid. A standard story structure in journalism, the inverted pyramid is all about front-loading information so someone who reads even the first two paragraphs of a story learns as much as possible. For science communication, this can help you hook the audience so they stay engaged through to the end. And for limited interactions like a public outreach event where visitors walk past your table, this sort of structure would be critical to conveying your message.We’ve thought a lot so far about how to start in a way that catches the audience’s attention, but how do you put a satisfying end on your story? This can sometimes be a frustrating challenge as you struggle to think of something broad and important that feels like a good ending. A simple approach that usually works is just to find a way to connect back to the idea or language you used at the very start. The job of an introduction is to transition someone into following your story, and an ending only needs to transition them out of it. A “full circle” reminder of the introduction is an easy way to do this.

Additional Resources

Download our science communication planner and try working through these steps.