The art of Storytelling: communicating science through powerful stories

We have evolved as social mammals with spoken language, and stories appeal to our feelings, which in turn help us to learn. In this course, we will touch upon different aspects of constructing and presenting science through storytelling.

Module I: Story content

We will explore how the brains of most people are wired to pay more attention to stories than facts. We will learn how much new information we can retain, and the trade-off between explaining everything and sacrificing part of the information for the sake of our audience’s understanding. Finally, we will practice how to identify and extract the key points from our research that we want to convey, and how to transform them into a meaningful story, adjusting it to the level of our audience.

Module II: Written stories

We will practice how to compose a clear and captivating story based on our research, that is addressed to a broad scientific audience. We will practice on how to write an abstract that captures the interest of, and is accessible to the scientific community within and outside our field. Then, we will concentrate on how to turn this abstract into a concise article that tells the same story in more detail, paying particular attention to the appropriate level of information.

Module III: Visual stories

In this part of the course, we will learn how to create an effective visual story of our research that is addressed to both scientists and the wider public. We will look at applications and examples of visual communication of science and at how to plan your visual story, focusing on how to successfully deliver our story, considering our audience. We will also briefly touch upon some basic graphic design principles and their application in scientific communication.

The course includes one hour of one-to-one consulting on an abstract, a conference presentation, or an outreach activity.

Places are limited to 14 participants and will be occupied by strict registration order.