- Think about your favorite movie and think about
how that movie starts.
What are you feeling, what are you seeing,
are you curious?
Do you wanna know what's next?
(gentle music)
The hook of a talk, it's the equivalent of those
first 30 seconds or those first few sentences
of a book.
- It's a technique that a presenter can use
to really draw your audience's attention
and spark their curiosity.
A really good hook is something that has the audience
wanting more, they want to know what's gonna happen next.
(curious music)
When I think of hooks, I think of these two
really great examples from the Young
Scientist Seminars series.
There were actually two plant biologists.
Both of them had really interesting approaches,
very different and interesting approaches.
So Katie Murphy started with this beautiful image
of a plate of food.
- I'd like you to think about the last meal
that you had.
I hope it was delicious.
Maybe it looks something like this.
And I hope that it was filling.
But did you think about where that meal
actually came from?
How did it get to your plate?
I think about this a lot because I spend a lot
of time in a cornfield.
- Automatically, right, you're clued in and you are
thinking about your food and you are thinking about
the subject matter that she's going to talk about.
For Eric Hamilton, he took a different approach.
So he started with a very provocative statement.
- My research is all about sex,
the kind painted by the great masters of the Renaissance,
like in this Botticelli.
There's so much wonderful going in this scene, isn't there?
Like in the corner, we got this plant, clearly just
about to flower.
Must be so excited for this opportunity
it's been waiting its entire life for.
- Why is he talking about plants?
- Okay, yeah.
I study plant sex.
- It really is this very quick provocation
followed by surprise that again, kinda has you
on the edge of your seat.
- When I start by asking people a question,
they're like, wait, what?
This is different.
And so they perk up.
Also I'm asking them for a response
so they need to participate.
I find it much more compelling to launch into a story.
- So for my graduate work, I had a pretty easy
hook in that I got to name a protein 'cause it was
this unknown protein that I was working on
and what I found was this protein was a protector.
So when I was trying to come up with a name,
I decided to name it after the "Harry Potter"
protective charm, which is "expecto patronum".
So I named the protein Patronin.
It's an interesting little story that I could
include really early on in my talks and it always
made people laugh, which was good.
In my talks, sometimes I might include a hook
and sometimes I might not.
- Whether or not a hook is essential, I don't feel
that it is, but it can be very, very valuable.
If there are ways to add an element of surprise
or an element of relevancy to society or perhaps
even pop culture, I think that could always work
in people's favor.