- What I wanna convey is a clear nugget of information.
Something that someone can instantly
kind of register and remember.
- This talk was about blank, and they found this.
That's the core message.
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Normally, your core message is going to be
the most important finding from your research.
That's what you want people to remember,
is that cool new piece of data, that new discovery.
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- The goal of a presentation
is what you hope to achieve with your research talk.
Now, your core message, on the other hand,
that is the one key takeaway
that you want your audience to walk away with.
If my goal is to inform them of my research story,
well, what is the thing that I want them
to remember from my research story?
- The core message is also this touchstone
that I return to again and again
while I'm building the talk,
when I'm figuring out how I connect everything together.
- What data am I going to show
that really supports that core message?
And the amount of data that you show
will really be dictated by how much time you have.
In a 20-minute talk,
you have to be incredibly judicious
about the key data that you want to include,
versus a 60-minute talk,
you have a little bit more leeway
to include more supporting data.
- When thinking of tailoring your message,
it's important to keep in mind what your goal is
and what your audience is.
- The core message of two different talks
given on the same research project
to two different audiences
could be very different.
I was working on the brain, on inflammation
in the context of Parkinson's Disease,
and when I was talking to a scientific audience,
my core message was that
we had discovered new inflammatory signals
that were going from the brain immune cells
and causing neurodegeneration.
But when I was talking to more of a general audience,
my core message was more about
how discovering this process would eventually help
discover new therapies for Parkinson's Disease.
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Too much information can overwhelm your audience.
It is important to be able
to distill it down to 15 words or less.
- What is the most succinct way
that I could be saying these things
that would immediately click with my audience?
There's a technique called "Half-Life Your Message"
which can really help you do that.
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- With a partner, you're gonna tell them about your message
in 60 seconds,
and then you're gonna tell them about your message again
in 30 seconds.
Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to talk faster.
It means that you need to critically think about,
from those 60 seconds of information,
what are some things that you can shed
that might not be essential for that audience,
for your partner, to understand what your message is?
And then you take that 30-second message
and you cut it in half into 15 seconds,
and then you cut that in half into eight seconds.
You're extracting what's absolutely essential
about what you want to say,
because in eight seconds, realistically,
what you can tell people is one sentence.
Now, you can think about it as that elevator pitch.
If you had 30 seconds to be with someone in an elevator,
what would you tell them about your research
so that they would remember what it is about,
and why it is important?
- If it isn't communicated in a clear enough way
that I can remember it
and then also share it with somebody else,
then part of the purpose of giving a talk,
to share to a larger community, is lost.
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