- When you're giving a talk, it is never about you,
it's always about your audience.
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Who am I having a conversation with?
You know, who am I speaking with?
- The more that I can find out about an audience,
the more I can tailor the message that I have
to the people that are gonna be there.
The first thing you can do is just ask.
- Is this an international conference?
- Are they other researchers?
- They wanna learn new techniques.
- Are they students?
- Do they like sports?
Maybe I can make a college football reference.
- Are they there 'cause they have to be
and don't want to be there?
Those, I find the most fun talks
because you have to really engage an audience
who doesn't wanna listen to you.
- The more information I have about my audience,
the better I'm gonna be able to tailor
what I am going to say
so that it can connect with their previous knowledge,
with their experiences, and with who they are.
You have to look at your research
from your audience's perspective.
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- You want to emphasize and highlight
the parts of your research
that are going to connect with them.
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Maybe you have a phylogenetic tree in one
that is especially interesting to evolutionary biologists.
But if you're talking to a molecular geneticist,
you might wanna, you know,
forget about the phylogenetic tree
because you're gonna have to explain what it is
and all of the things behind it in significance.
But maybe you wanna do an experiment
where you swapped out some genes
and saw what the phenotype was.
That's something that they can connect to.
You're emphasizing very different aspects
so that they can connect to the work
and see the relevance to them.
- You need to know how familiar they are
with your area of research.
You need to understand what you might need to define.
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So I think there's a big misconception
in assuming that the audience knows more than they do.
For example, I worked with microtubules
which is a part of something called cytoskeleton,
but I couldn't tell you like in-depth stuff about actin,
which is another part of the cytoskeleton,
even though people would say we're in the same field.
So if I went to a talk about actin,
I'd really need to have a lot of introduction
to understand what the person was looking at
and why they thought it was important.
- You could have an audience
that has scientists in an entirely different field from you.
And so you can't make the assumption
that they understand certain jargon
that especially is specific to your own field or subfield.
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What is the background information
that my audience really needs to understand
the research and the field behind the work that I've done,
as well as the individual experiments themselves?
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- By determining who your audience is,
you will be able to tell how much information
you want to include in your talk,
whether it's an introduction or the body of your talk.
- I also think about my audience
in using different stylistic features of an introduction,
especially like a hook, for example.
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When I'm trying to tell a story
to make the subjects that I'm conveying more relatable.
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- I could give an analogy about,
like, the Golden Gate Bridge.
You know, like, bridging two parts of the Bay Area.
This talks to me, this talks to everyone else
living in the Bay Area,
but it might not talk to someone that lives in Paris.
You need to think about tailoring your analogies
to your audience.
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- I think a really big part of giving a good talk
is just being able to relate to the people that are there.
And in order to do that I wanna sort of know
who the audience is.
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