Made to Stick: Delivering effective scientific presentations and posters
Transcript of Made to Stick: Delivering effective scientific presentations and posters
Made to Delivering effective scientific presentations
and posters
Steve Lee, PhD; [email protected]
Graduate Diversity Officer for the STEM Disciplines GradPathways
University of California, Davis October 6, 2016
Use as many of these 6 key principles as possible:
S Simple • Find and share your core message.
• Prioritize your messages to discover the core.
• Simplicity isn’t about dumbing down.
• Look for analogies or illustrations to communicate your message.
U Unexpected • Help people to be curious. Use questions.
• To grab their attention, violate a schema. Be counterintuitive.
• To hold their attention, use curiosity gaps. Before your message can stick,
your audience has to want it.
C Concrete
• Help people to understand. Be specific.
• To be concrete, use sensory language. Provide visual images.
• Concrete is memorable. Abstract is not.
• Explain your ideas in terms of human actions and tangible details.
C Credible
• Help people to believe you. Give evidence.
• Ideas can get credibility from authorities, data, and real-life experiences.
• Data and statistics can be useful, but bring them to life by contextualizing
them in terms that are personable and relevant to everyday experiences.
E Emotional
• Help people to care about your message. Inspire.
• People care about people, so share their experiences.
• Invoke self-interest. WIIFM: What’s in it for me?
• Appeal to identity: who they are now, and who they want to be.
S Stories
• Help people to remember. Simulate.
• Stories drive action through simulation (what to do) and inspiration (why to
do it). Stories can help people imagine how a problem can be resolved, or
help people to imagine themselves in the message.
Resources: ● Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick”. They also have free resources at: http://heathbrothers.com/ ● To learn how to be unexpected and introduce mystery boxes, see JJ Abram’s TED talk:
○ http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box
● To deal with nervousness, see Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on Power Poses
○ https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are
Thanks for coming to my workshop! I hope that it was helpful. My materials are posted in < www.slideshare.net >.