- What was it like to be alone in the lab
when you made that discovery?
It could be a line or two.
But that's a story.
That's a way to take a specific bit of knowledge
that you're trying to convey
and tie it to an emotion, tie it to a mental image.
- You can use stories to bring your audience
with you to that moment.
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- When thinking about your research talk,
you know, there's definitely thinking about
what is the story arc or the logical flow
of the research talk?
But there's also stories that can happen within a talk.
We like to call them vignettes, little story vignettes.
- Experiences you had maybe in the lab,
or maybe doing fieldwork or something that relates
to your data or your experience
that helps bring some aspect alive.
- So these little vignettes, you string them together
to then build the full story of your talk.
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Sometimes we talk about that "aha moment".
A result that you see all of a sudden.
It's that result that you've been looking for.
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- I would always talk about my happiest day
in graduate school, which is when I did an experiment
late at night in a dark microscope room.
I was by myself.
No one else was in the lab.
And I had just done this experiment a little bit on a whim,
because I didn't think it was gonna work.
And it basically supported my hypothesis
and was THE experiment.
And I just remember that feeling of excitement.
- Stories about who could be impacted and how
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can get people to really care about your story
and your research.
Like sharing a story of a patient
who perhaps is suffering from a disease
for which there is no treatment or cure.
- Everybody is struggling with something.
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Any story of struggle
is in my opinion, easily relatable.
- If you were working in the field,
let's say that you are in a forest
and you're trying to find this particular animal
that's really, really small.
And you're walking for miles and miles.
And then eventually you found it.
Or maybe you didn't find it.
It took you three days.
You know, tell us about that.
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There are different storytelling techniques
that you could use.
- They could as simple as just kind of painting a scene
to understand the circumstances.
- Along the riverbank,
you can see these beautiful, bright, iridescent moths.
You can see butterflies sipping up muddy water
and gathering minerals.
And if you're really lucky,
you can see this peculiar sight of butterflies
actually mobbing a turtle head and sipping up its tears.
- A really helpful way for using a story
could be to make a seemingly
very impersonal and inaccessible subject
be very much relatable and personal.
- When I cut my finger this fall cutting sweet potatoes,
I opened the skin unintentionally,
and introduced bacteria from the environment into my body.
Now the reason that I didn't get an infection
from those bacteria is because I have white blood cells,
whose job it is to go around my body
and engulf bacteria to remove them.
Now, not all of the white blood cells
in my body live in my fingertip.
They live all over.
And they're job is to go to wherever the bacteria are
whenever bacteria get introduced.
- I thought that was just a really clever way
to understand the concept of gradient tracking.
You know, which can be hard
for even expert audiences to understand.
You could use story as a means
to try to build empathy for your subject.
- You've got your face in the water.
It's silent because your ears are filled with water.
All you hear is your breath resonating in the snorkel.
And then you start to just watch the sharks
slowly swimming by you.
You then notice that all the sharks
have a different spotting pattern
that's as unique as a fingerprint.
They're beautiful, beautiful animals.
- Many people, not surprising, are scared of sharks.
Leopard sharks actually don't attack people.
And that's the information
that Andy was really trying to convey.
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- When you're thinking about what are the vignettes?
Like what are the little stories
that you're going to weave into your talk,
something to think about is is going back to your goal,
your message, and your audience.
That's gonna help you choose what information is essential.
So it's gonna help you choose
which vignettes are going to tell the best story
so that you can meet the goals that you established.
So that you can deliver that core message
to reach that audience effectively.
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