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.
Module IV: Putting you in your story
In this part of the course, we will focus on including ourselves in our storytelling. We will explore who we are as storytellers and how we can create more impactful stories by adding a personal touch.
This course will be particularly useful for early-career scientists that are not very familiar with presenting their research findings to a scientific or wider audience. However, it is open to all scientists that wish to practice scientific storytelling.
After this course, participants will be able to:
- Identify and extract key points from your research
- Construct an approachable overview of your research
- Make decisions on the level of detail of your story, depending on target audience
- Create an effective visual story of your research
- Add a personal touch to your story
