- There is a formula for a scientific paper,
and it's important to recognize
that a scientific talk is different.
They're two different forms of communication.
That's not to say that one is better than the other,
but they serve different needs.
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- You cannot just take your paper
and translate that into a talk.
- A research paper is something
that you can sit with for hours on end if needed,
and you have all the time to pore through the data
to make sense of it.
- You address all of the controls,
all of the caveats, all of the pieces,
you probably have both figures in your paper
and supplementary data.
- The abstract has...
It's a summary of the work,
but it also has the implications in there,
what really came out of the work.
So you already have a frame of reference
to understand what you're about to read.
But what many scientists do
when they're giving presentations is,
instead of really thinking about
what that abstract is doing,
they just follow the structure of the paper
from the background, introduction,
all the way to the conclusion.
- In a talk, you have to have a self-contained story,
so you have to provide your audience
all the information that they need
through your introduction,
so that they can process the data
that you're going to provide in the body of the talk.
And in the conclusions, you have to make sense
of the data that you've provided them.
- It needs to be clear, it needs to be succinct,
and it needs to be focused on the things
that your audience really needs to know.
When you're building a paper,
or when it's gone through review,
there's often that dreaded reviewer number three
that is the complete stickler.
The joke is, "Ugh, reviewer number three,"
and there's all these things you need to do
to satisfy your reviewers,
and all of these things that maybe end up in your paper,
or in supplementary data.
That sort of stuff is likely
never gonna show up in your talk.
Your talk is actually responding to reviewers one and two
who wanna know your story, and wanna hear about it,
and wanna see the data and the important implications.
- You really get to include
more of the backstory, more of yourself,
really explain why you decided
to do the experiments you wanted to do.
If you have the time, you're really able to go into
why did you do this technique,
what was important about the setup,
why was this the setup you chose to test this experiment,
and how did it help you or not help you
in what you were trying to understand
about what you were testing.
- Talks are an opportunity to present more of a story arc.
Were there things that were surprising to you?
- Why did you make the decisions that you made?
- The things that you tried that didn't work.
- Did you have expectations that weren't met?
- What uncertainties did you face?
- Talks actually should complement papers.
They would provide this high-level view of your project.
- It allows scientists to really understand
the full picture of the work that you're doing.
- There is something that you can convey in person
that not only gives a sense of what you've learned,
and how you've learned it,
but why you've done it, the passion that drove you,
the story behind, not just the discovery,
but the person and the circumstances
in which that discovery was made.
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