Every Scientist knows the problem. You are presenting at a scientific conference or giving a talk at a lecture series to a mildly interested audience. You don’t know how to stand out and be remembered from the gazillion of presenters your audience heard before and will hear afterwards.
Thankfully Chip and Dan Heath have written a super helpful book about how to make things stick in peoples’ heads. So make yourself and your talk stay in your listeners’ memories with the principles outlined in the book “Make to Stick”.
The book is not explicitly written with scientific presentations in mind. But it gives great advice for PhD students and seasoned researchers.
There are six pieces of advice in the book “Make to Stick”. I like, that you do not need to cover them all. Just follow as many as you can, and your presentation will be more memorable and less boring.
Make your ideas simple
I acknowledge that presenting your ideas in a simple way is challenging for most scientists. After all, science is not simple.
Still, try to make an effort. It will pay off. If you introduce novel concepts, try to relate them to something the audience is already familiar with.
Weave in something unexpected
This might be easy if you present some surprising findings. Did you made a discovery by chance or did you find a correlation, you were not expecting?
But even if you cannot shine with some unexpected results, you could scatter in some surprising facts about your research topic.
Be concrete
Use concrete terms. Incorporate abstractions only sparingly.
What did you do exactly? What did you find exactly? What does this mean exactly?
Be credible
This should be easy, you may think. After all, as a scientist I am all about facts and figures. Great! Then quote the statistics, show the data but don’t go overboard and swamp your audience with numbers.
Make it emotional
Making your scientific talk emotional might sound counterintuitive to you. Still, it is one of the best ways to stay in your listeners’ heads.
Tell your audience why they should care about this particular scientific problem. Don’t assume they know and feel what you know and feel.
If appropriate, “introduce” single test subjects or patients instead of boring numbers.
Tell a good story
Tell an interesting story. Depending on your research topic, you could tell a story about what happened when people were not yet aware of the problem. You could tell a story how your research findings affected the live of a real person.
Stories are much better remembered than naked data. Use this trait of the human brain.