Alan Barker

Don’t fake it: five steps to beat imposter syndrome in science communication

Image: Sketchplanations

Does this image ring any bells?

If so, welcome to the club. You, too, may be experiencing imposter syndrome, a key barrier to effective science communication.

And, if so, you’re in very good company.

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On 1 October 1861 – two years after he published On the Origin of Species, and by now world-famous – Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to his friend, Charles Lyell:  

 

 

But I am very poorly today + very stupid + hate everybody + everything. One lives only to make blunders. — I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am | Ever yours | C. Darwin.

 

 

Darwin displays three qualities that are regularly associated with imposter syndrome.   

• A feeling of never being competent or knowledgeable enough
• Consistent critical self-talk
• An excessive focus on failures and mistakes

But his letter lacks one element essential to imposterism, which didn’t appear until 1978.

In that year, two psychologists – Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes – published a paper entitled The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women. The 150-plus women they studied all reported symptoms similar to Darwin’s, with one crucial addition.

They said that they felt like frauds.

According to Clance and Imes, they were particularly prone to “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness” and lived in perpetual fear that “some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors.”

 

Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes

image via https://blog.10minuteschool.com/fighting-the-impostor-syndrome/

By 1982, a journalist in Vogue was referring to “the ‘impostor’ syndrome” – a phrase Clance and Imes disliked and never used. In 2011, Valerie Young published her bestseller, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women; since then, the topic has generated over 3,500 papers and a heap of self-help books.

(Incidentally, ‘impostor’ and ‘imposter’ seem to be more or less interchangeable spellings. If you’re interested, check out this article. I shall continue to favour ‘imposter’ in this post, except when I quote other writers.)

Whatever it is – phenomenon or syndrome – imposterism seems to be widespread. One much-repeated statistic, apparently originating in a 2007 article by John Gravois, suggests that 70% of us – men and women – experience imposter syndrome at some point. I took the Clance Test while researching this post. I scored 61 out of 100, indicating that I ‘frequently have Impostor feelings’. Which seems reasonable.

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According to Sandeep Ravindram, imposterism “seems especially common in competitive and creative fields, and those where evaluations are subjective. […] The feeling of being a fraud is also common in fast-changing fields such as technology or medicine.”

What about academia? As May Merino points out in a revealing post for The Oxford Scientist, measures of success in the post-grad, post-doc arena are much more nuanced than in undergraduate education, where grades and test scores offer seemingly clearer metrics of achievement. “The shift to being surrounded by scientists at the top of their game can be a challenging one,” Merino continues, and can “even evoke feelings of not deserving a seat at their table.”

Imposterism also thrives on feelings of isolation. After all, as Merino says, “every researcher’s path is unique.” The problems you face on that path – failed experiments, ambiguous survey results – “will not,” she says, “exactly mirror those that others face.” When things go wrong, you may feel trapped, ashamed as much by the sense of failure as by the prospect of giving it all up.

image by jcomp on Freepik

All of these feelings might be amplified in a competitive, ‘publish or perish’ culture, dominated by grant applications, citation scores and high impact factors. Heaven forbid that your peers might engage in back-biting or bullying to promote their own research…

In a recent article, Kate Munley writes: "the prevalence of imposter syndrome may be grossly underestimated in academia, particularly because mental health is considered a social stigma in higher education."

Now put science communication into the mix.

Is it possible that, in a research-intensive environment, showing an interest in public understanding of science might mark you out as a not-entirely serious researcher? That getting involved in science outreach or science engagement makes you feel somehow unworthy to be a scientist?

Well: I’ll assume that you’re willing to counter such negative thoughts. After all, you’re planning to make a presentation. Good for you. So: what to do?

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Let’s focus, just for now, on the presentation itself.

1. Observe your feelings.

Whatever they are, those feelings are not you. They’ve appeared from somewhere else and have chosen to visit. Bid them welcome.

It’s not so easy to view these thoughts objectively if you’re nervous. So take a few moments to breathe deeply – 7-11 breathing is a great technique here – and then let these feelings in through the door.

Write a few calling cards for them: one card for each feeling. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Who do you think you are?” “They'll find you out." (Use the word ‘you’ – not ‘I’.) There they are, sitting on the desk in front of you. Don’t tear them up. Take a look. Say ‘hi’. And be kind to them.

image via Redbubble

2. Ask yourself what you can learn.

These feelings are a sign that you’re challenging yourself to do something new. You’re stretching yourself, taking a risk, stepping outside your comfort zone. And that’s good. Who wants to do the same thing day in, day out, for the rest of their life?

Nerves are a sign that you care. That you want to do a good job in this presentation.

So, what can you learn from the experience? How can you use it to become a better speaker, to explain your ideas more clearly, to construct more effective arguments?

Set some clear goals for yourself. And then think about what you can do to achieve them.

3. Focus on your audience.

Next, set some goals for the presentation itself.

I’ll guess that your focus so far has been almost entirely on your material. You’ve spent hours on the slides. You’ve tried your utmost to cover every base, every angle. You feel that you need to include everything. You don’t want to be found out, right?

Good.

Now change your focus. Think about your audience. Think about how you want to influence them. How do you want them to leave your presentation?

• What do you want them to think (or know, or have an opinion about)?
• What do you want them to feel?
• And what do you want them to do?

All three goals matter. But the dynamic between them will shift, depending on your audience.

• At a conference, you might want your audience to know a lot but not necessarily do anything.
• If you’re presenting to policy-makers or government officials, you might want them to take specific actions.
• If you’re talking to young people at a science festival, influencing their feelings might come to the fore.

Now you need to decide how to achieve these goals. So:

4. Find the narrative.

Your goals for the presentation describe where you want your audience to be at the end of the presentation.

Now think about where they are at the start.

What do they already know and feel? If you’re not sure, then make a reasonable guess: what are they likely to be thinking about and feeling in relation to this topic?

Your presentation needs to take them on a journey from where they are to where you want them to be. That journey is the narrative of the presentation.

There are lots of ways of creating this narrative. You might want to tell a story. But stories are only one kind of narrative. Two narrative structures that I find consistently helpful are the And, But, Therefore structure, and something called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

(Image Source)

By this point, you’ll probably realise that you need to reorganise your material. Go ahead.

5. Practise and get detailed feedback.

Rehearse. In real time. With a real audience, if you can possibly do so.

Choose someone whose opinion your trust: preferably not a close colleague or someone who’s familiar with your research. Ask for specific, detailed feedback. What did they understand? Where did they get lost? How are you coming across?

Use this feedback to identify your strengths as a presenter. Build on those skills. Don’t worry about eliminating your faults. They’re probably not faults, anyway.

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It is possible that impostor syndrome is not actually a Thing. Or rather, it could be as much the result of external factors as of mental activity. Increasingly, researchers are looking for the roots of this experience in social structures, systemic inequalities and what historian Christy Pichichero has called discriminatory gaslighting. All of which deserves another blog post.

Meanwhile, one final thought. It’s not mine; it comes from Professor Jessica Collett.

“Impostorism,” she writes, “is most often found among extremely talented and capable individuals, not people who are true impostors.”

So, if you do feel assailed by imposter syndrome, it’s probably because you are extremely knowledgeable and competent. If you were a real imposter, you wouldn’t feel like one.

If you want to read more about preparing a great science presentation, check out these three posts on my blog.

So what? The conundrum of science communication

Whats your message? Finding-the-foundation-of-a-great-science-presentation

Presenting science: finding the structure

Order out of chaos: speechwriting under pressure

Most speeches are written to tight deadlines. But some deadlines are tighter than others. At the Brilliant Communicators’ conference run by the European Speechwriters’ Network on 18 November, we were given a rare insight into the challenges of crafting a speech in truly exceptional circumstances.

Josh Molofsky currently works at the American embassy in London. Back in 2020, he was speechwriter for Chuck Schumer, Democrat and Minority Leader of the US Senate. In late December that year, Schumer paid tribute to Josh’s skills: “every day,” he said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, he “bring[s] poetry and organization to my thoughts.”

Two weeks later, Josh would need to do all that and more.

6 January 2021. Late afternoon. At about 2pm, the Senate had gone into emergency recess as rioters stormed the Capitol. Now, four hours later, order was being restored. Schumer, holed up at Fort McNair, had only limited knowledge of what had happened inside the Capitol. With events still unfolding, he would have to address the reconvened Senate – and about 40 million people watching on television. It was Josh’s job to find the words.

He had 45 minutes.

His thoughts turned to the ancient Greek creation myth. Out of chaos, order. Not just the usual chaos of thoughts, feelings and images inside any writer’s head as they set to work, but the terrifying chaos of an insurrection against the orderly administration of a democracy.

So: did he make a plan?

“Not at all,” Josh told me afterwards. “It entirely emerged as I worked. When you’re up against a deadline as tight as this one, you don’t have time to sketch things out. You know you simply have to begin, and hope that one item will flow to the next. That’s what happened here.”

Here’s Josh’s own account of what he wrote, together with the words as Schumer finally spoke them in the Senate.

(You can watch Schumer delivering the speech here.)

1: Set the context.

Somewhere in the background, I suspect that the elements of a classical oration are informing Josh's thinking. First, the exordium: establish the speaker's credibility – hence the personal references at the very beginning –  and announce the purpose of your speech. Josh needs to find, in his words, "a common term": a way of contextualising this event for the audience. What’s just happened is unprecedented. Trumpism itself is unnervingly ahistorical. So, Josh looks to the past.

It is very, very difficult to put into words what has transpired today. I have never lived through, or even imagined, an experience like the one we have just witnessed in this Capitol. President Franklin Roosevelt set aside Dec. 7, 1941, as a day that will live in infamy. Unfortunately, we can now add Jan. 6, 2021, to that very short list of dates in American history that will live forever in infamy.

2: What happened?

Now, the narratio: tell us what happened. Paint a picture. This is enargia: what Richard Lanham calls “vigorous ocular demonstration”. By ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ the events in their minds' eye, the audience becomes more deeply involved, not only cognitively but emotionally.

But Schumer’s words need to do more. After all, his audience have been watching actual images of the riot all afternoon. So Josh subtly frames these events within a wider, deeper narrative.

“I’m a big believer in ‘word strings’," he said: "the use of similar terms throughout a paragraph to create a sense of coherence for the listener.” That sense of coherence is generated imaginatively: the word strings generate meaning by creating networks of associations. Here, the words ‘temple’, ‘desecrated’, ‘hallowed’, ‘shelter’ evoke the ancient idea of a sacred space polluted (in this case, literally – people defecated on the Senate floor).

“I reached for these terms because they have a very biblical significance,” Josh told me. “Schumer and I are both Jewish, and when you talk about temples being desecrated, we think of Chanukkah, a holiday about the Temple of David being destroyed, and more importantly, being re-consecrated. That’s what this speech was trying to do: re-consecrate or re-dedicate Congress to its rightful purpose.”

These word strings operate at the speed of light. Look at that word ‘stalk’, which transforms the rioters into monsters from the underworld – or maybe George Romero’s Living Dead. A single word sparks a direct imaginative connection, flashing in under the radar of rational thought.

This temple to democracy was desecrated, its windows smashed, our offices vandalized. The world saw Americans' elected officials hurriedly ushered out because they were in harm's way. The House and Senate floors were places of shelter until the evacuation was ordered, leaving rioters to stalk these hallowed halls. Lawmakers and our staffs, average citizens who love their country, serve it every day, feared for their lives. I understand that one woman was shot and tragically lost her life. We mourn her and feel for her friends and family.

And then the images are objectified, so that we can reflect on them. Like Greek heroes, we feel shame and dishonour.

These images were projected for the world. Foreign embassies cabled their home capitals to report the harrowing scenes at the very heart of our democracy. This will be a stain on our country not so easily washed away – the final, terrible, indelible legacy of the 45th president of the United States, undoubtedly our worst.

3: Name the villains and heroes.

We're moving on to the confirmatio, sometimes referred to as the 'proof'. Who’s responsible for this outrage? The perpetrators must be – if not named – at least defined.

He signals his intention by saying what they can’t be called. Then he turns - consciously or not – to synonymia: “the use of several synonyms together,” according to the trusty Silva Rhetoricae website, “to amplify or explain a given subject or term.” Synonymia “adds emotional force or intellectual clarity”, and “often occurs in parallel fashion.” As it does, more or less, here: check out the three-part list of paired definitions.

I want to be very clear: Those who performed these reprehensible acts cannot be called protesters – no, these were rioters and insurrectionists, goons and thugs, domestic terrorists. They do not represent America. They were a few thousand violent extremists who tried to take over the Capitol building and attack our democracy. They must and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law – hopefully by this administration, if not certainly by the next. They should be provided no leniency.

The enemy is nameless. The heroes, in contrast, are named.

I want to thank the many of the Capitol Hill police and Secret Service and local police who kept us safe today, and worked to clear the Capitol and return it to its rightful owners and its rightful purpose. I want to thank the leaders, Democrat and Republican, House and Senate. It was Speaker Pelosi, Leader McConnell, Leader McCarthy and myself who came together and decided that these thugs would not succeed, that we would finish the work that our Constitution requires us to complete in the very legislative chambers of the House and Senate that were desecrated but we know always belong to the people and do again tonight.

There is, of course, one name still to be spoken.

And Josh holds that name back.

“I wasn’t quite ready to say the President was entirely to blame,” he told me; “it was happening too quickly. Hence the ‘great deal’ and ‘in good part’.”

Plenty of rhetorical devices here: opening the section, again, with a negation (‘did not happen spontaneously’, echoing ‘cannot be called protestors’); anaphora ­– three times ‘the president’ rings out, three times he is accused; the antithesis between ‘discourages’ and ‘encourages’; the three-part lists that pepper this section of the speech. And the rising sense of outrage is pulled under control with the resonating references back to shame and the judgement of history.

“I’d never have used the word ‘demagogic’,” said Josh, “if Schumer hadn’t used it with me on one of our phone calls leading up to the speech. Whenever I had even a hint of his thinking, I made sure it found the way into the speech, like a signpost.”

But make no mistake, make no mistake, my friends, today's events did not happen spontaneously. The president, who promoted conspiracy theories and motivated these thugs, the president who exhorted them to come to our nation's capital, egged them on – who hardly ever discourages violence and more often encourages it – this president bears a great deal of the blame. This mob was in good part President Trump's doing, incited by his words, his lies. This violence, in good part his responsibility, his ever-lasting shame. Today's events certainly – certainly – would not have happened without him. Now, January 6 will go down as one of the darkest days in recent American history. A final warning to our nation about the consequences of a demagogic president, the people who enable him, the captive media that parrots his lies and the people who follow him as he attempts to push America to the brink of ruin.

Listen to the way Schumer exploits that last phrase: it’s at 4.47 in the YouTube clip. “I used to keep track of the words that sang in his Brooklyn accent,” said Josh. “The way he pronounces ru-in with two distinct syllables always stood out to me.”

4: Point the way forward.

The peroration was the hardest part to write. (It often is.)

“I needed to find an emotional core to organise around,” Josh told us.

He tries to plug into his feelings of heartbreak and turns for inspiration to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, in 1861: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Schumer rejects it. Too soft.

Josh tries again, this time channelling anger. He attempts a homily: more enargia, in an effort to embed the horrors of the day in the audience’s memory.

Three hours after the attack on January 6^th, after the carnage and mayhem was shown on every television screen in America, President Trump told his supporters to ‘remember this day forever.’ I ask the American people to heed his words: remember this day forever. But not for the reasons the president intends. Remember the panic in the voices over the radio dispatch; the rhythmic pounding of fists and flags at the chamber doors. Remember the crack of the solitary gunshot; the hateful and racist Confederate Flag flying through the halls of our Union; the screams of the bloodied officer crushed between the onrushing mob and a doorway to the Capitol, his body trapped in the breach…

And so on.

Schumer rejects it. Too hard. And why tell the audience to remember? It's far too early to forget.

Time is running out.

Last throw. What to do?

Look forward.

As we reconvene tonight, let us remember, in the end all this mob has really accomplished is to delay our work by a few hours. We will resume our responsibilities now, and we will finish our task tonight. The House and Senate chambers will be restored good as new and ready for legislating in short order. The counting of the electoral votes is our sacred duty. Democracy's roots in this nation are deep, they are strong. And they will not be undone ever by a group of thugs. Democracy will triumph, as it has for centuries.

“I can tell I wrote this quickly,” Josh explained, “because of the verb/noun pairings. The verb I want for the second sentence is 'uproot' but it’s so similar to the first that I opt for 'undone', which is something you can do to democracy but not its roots. Too late to fix, though!"

(My own view, for what it’s worth: ‘uproot’ or ‘tear out’ would have worked fine. If you set up a metaphor, follow it through. Subtly, of course.)

“This was an intensely political speech,” Josh told me. “I was supremely aware of the many audiences this speech needed to address or mollify.

“The first few paragraphs are written for a national audience – straight down the middle.

“The next two are written for the Democratic base, our most important source of political support. The fellow Republican leaders are named in gratitude as an olive branch to the centre-right.

“And the close goes back to the general audience.

“There has to be enough for everyone to say, ‘Ok, he sees it a bit like I do.’ Sometimes, you have to select the audience for the message you want them to pay attention to. Hence that tactic: ‘to my fellow Americans…’  I wanted to tell them that whatever message was about to come next was intended just for them.

“I was really writing to myself. But also to everyone who felt like I did that day.”

So, to my fellow Americans who are shocked and appalled by the images on their televisions today and who are worried about the future of this country, let me speak to you directly: The divisions in our country clearly run deep, but we are a resilient, forward-looking and optimistic people, and we will begin the hard work of repairing this nation tonight. Because here in America we do hard things. In America, we always overcome our challenges.

‘Hard things’ echoes, deliberately or otherwise, Kennedy’s 1962 ‘We choose to go to the moon’ speech. But this is a sober ending: no attempt to rouse or enthuse; rather, a sense of gritty determination and quiet optimism.

For me, the real achievement of this speech is that Josh trusts his imagination and intuition to guide him. ("Well, yes," he conceded; "and years of speechwriting experience.")

Unlike Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, who spoke before him – you can see their tight-lipped speeches here and here – Schumer frames the appalling events of January 6 in a wider context that offers the reassurance of meaning in the face of the incomprehensible.

Just as Josh intended: order out of chaos.

And what did he learn from this experience? “Focus on the facts,” he replied. “What you’re writing is the first draft of history.”

To enjoy more insights from fellow speechwriting professionals, join the European Speechwriter Network and book a place at one of their conferences.

Mixing method and experience: 'Leading Lines' by Lucinda Holdforth

Leading Lines

Lucinda Holdforth

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd (6 Feb. 2020)

ISBN-10: 1460757297

ISBN-13: 978-1460757291

 

 

There are, broadly, two types of speechwriting book. There are manuals offering a systematic method, the most celebrated of which, currently, is probably Richard Lehrman’s The Political Speechwriter’s Companion. And there are the memoirs of speechwriters, most of them, according to Lucinda Holdforth in her new book, “laments over totally failed speechwriting relationships.”

Leading Lines sits – quite comfortably, in fact – between these two camps. Dr Holdforth herself is no failure: she’s worked at the highest political and corporate levels in her native Australia. She knows whereof she speaks.

And she’s produced a real page-turner.

Leadership, she says, is changing.

“During my own long career I have witnessed the emergence of new, non-elected leaders with tremendous overt or hidden politician influence, for better or worse. The most significant of these have been corporate leaders.”

She cites, too, the rise of advocacy groups, charitable organisations, and “new leaders … from previously untapped and sometimes unlikely sources”, all of whom need to speak well. In fact, she’s said elsewhere,

“when any individual gives a speech, they become a leader. They have the precious opportunity to lead their listeners to a new attitude or understanding or insight.”

To reverse the logic: giving a speech inevitably makes a leader of the speaker.

Politicians usually have an implicit understanding of the need to harness the power of rhetoric. But “words do not have the same automatic positive connotations for corporate types,” writes Dr Holdforth. CEOs tend to see communication as “an unpleasant addition to their job, rather than central to its execution.” But, she says, “if you want to lead, you have to persuade. If you want to persuade, then you will need to give speeches.” You may need a speechwriter to help you. Leading Lines is aimed at both speechwriters and speechmakers (though, in truth, I wonder how many will find it).

Speeches themselves are increasingly taking on a life beyond the podium. They’re now broadcast through a host of channels; indeed, “this wide dissemination is one reason why a great speech is such a valuable investment: it becomes a driving and unifying communication tool.”

In this wider environment, they become subject to new pressures and constraints. Dr Holdforth goes as far as to say – echoing Mark Thompson in his book Enough Said – that “political correctness has been a disaster for plain speaking and public discourse.” She notes an increasing scepticism among audiences:

“Anyone who takes on a traditional leadership role in the modern world comes up against a wall of cynicism – legitimate cynicism.”

As she sees it, the way to deal with both challenges – the well-meaning but baroque obfuscations, and the jeering hostility that they so often provoke – is to focus on argument.

Finding the argument is at the heart of her strategy when working with a speaker. Many of her business clients give her what they see as a speech structure; she recognises it as “a record of their thinking process, culminating in the main message. The task of the speechwriter is to flip the order, and make sure the main message is up the front and structures the entire speech.”  

“A leader’s speech works best as the resolve product of thinking, not a record of the thinking process. The voice of reason has an integrity and a sense of resolution… Speechwriting is no a transcription services, but a creation service. The words don’t just reflect an idea; very often, they also shape and crystallise it.”

Here is a rhetorician boldly reasserting the centrality of what Cicero called invention in rhetorical practice. “This clarity of writing,” she says, “is about more than just a modern and mobile style. It is a form of ethics.” Rhetoric without argument is facile and trivial. But we who value rhetoric, she says, must not succumb to despair in the face of Etonian classical allusions or incoherent ranting.

“The answer to rhetoric that we don’t like … is … not less rhetoric, it’s more and better rhetoric.”

And what makes it better is a focus on argument. Everything in a speech – the speaker’s authority, the stories they tell, the emotions they conjure – everything derives from their core argument.

Dr Holdforth invokes Barbara Minto: she of the famous Pyramid Principle, born of McKinsey and now ubiquitous in the corporate universe, if still rarely followed. Too many corporate communications managers, for instance, supply speechwriters with lists of bullet points described as the ‘outline’ of a speech. “Joining the dots,” writes Dr Holdforth, “just creates a list of ideas, not an argument.”

A leader’s argument must also address the beliefs and values underlying their audience’s cynicism. “Any thorough argument,” she writes, “must increasingly go back to basics and question the underlying assumptions” – and she invokes Stephen Toulmin’s warrant-based model of argumentation to support her thesis.

Leaders, of course, must also tell stories. Dr Holdforth sees that stories supply our deep need for meaning, so any story that the leader tells must knit with a robust argument to supply that meaning.  She points out, strikingly, that the argument will often itself supply the emotion that lifts a speech. “Clients tell me they want their speech to have stories with passion,” she writes, “as if passion were an ornament that you could paste on any old speech draft, rather than the intellectual energy driving and shaping it.”

She’s particularly good on ceremonial speeches. “Many of us,” she writes, “live in a lonely and godless world, and we hunger for ceremonies that lend significance to our days.” But, in fact, “few occasions reveal deep, underlying divisions and discord more than a ceremonial event.” The job of a ceremonial speech, then, is not so much to generate energy as to channel the energy already in the room: “to tap into that energy and reflect it back to the audience.” The speaker should remind us “why we love each other despite our flaws, and stick together despite our differences.” The speech, she says, “becomes a form of communion.”

So, in this new book, Lucinda Holdforth supplies a rich mix of method and experience. Where Lehrman’s book is like taking a training course, Leading Lines is like an apprenticeship. If you’re a professional speechwriter, buy two copies: one for yourself and one for your speaker. (Bookmark the opening of Chapter 4 for their attention.)

Keep it close at hand; you’ll find yourself coming back to it. Leading Lines is a book that just keeps giving.

Arguing with passion

Leading Lines

Lucinda Holdforth

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd, 2019

ISBN-10: 1460757297

ISBN-13: 978-1460757291

There are, broadly, two types of speechwriting book.

There are manuals offering a systematic method, the most celebrated of which, currently, is probably Richard Lehrman’s The Political Speechwriter’s Companion.

And there are the memoirs of speechwriters, most of them, according to Lucinda Holdforth in her new book, “laments over totally failed speechwriting relationships.”

Leading Lines sits – quite comfortably, in fact – between these two camps. Dr Holdforth, be it said at once, is no failure: she’s worked at the highest political and corporate levels in her native Australia. She knows whereof she speaks.

And she’s produced a real page-turner.

Leadership, she says, is changing.

"During my own long career I have witnessed the emergence of new, non-elected leaders with tremendous overt or hidden politician influence, for better or worse. The most significant of these have been corporate leaders.”

She cites, too, the rise of advocacy groups, charitable organisations, and “new leaders … from previously untapped and sometimes unlikely sources”, all of whom need to speak well. In fact, she’s said elsewhere,

“when any individual gives a speech, they become a leader. They have the precious opportunity to lead their listeners to a new attitude or understanding or insight.”

To reverse the logic: giving a speech inevitably makes a leader of the speaker.

Politicians usually have an implicit understanding of the need to harness the power of rhetoric. “Words do not have the same automatic positive connotations for corporate types,” writes Dr Holdforth. CEOs tend to see communication as “an unpleasant addition to their job, rather than central to its execution.” But, she says, “if you want to lead, you have to persuade. If you want to persuade, then you will need to give speeches.” You may need a speechwriter to help you. Leading Lines is aimed at both speechwriters and speechmakers.

Speeches themselves are increasingly taking on a life beyond the podium. They’re now broadcast through a host of channels; indeed, “this wide dissemination is one reason why a great speech is such a valuable investment: it becomes a driving and unifying communication tool.”

In this wider environment, they become subject to new pressures and constraints. Dr Holdforth goes as far as to say – echoing Mark Thompson in his book Enough Said – that “political correctness has been a disaster for plain speaking and public discourse.” She notes an increasing scepticism among audiences:

“Anyone who takes on a traditional leadership role in the modern world comes up against a wall of cynicism – legitimate cynicism.”

As she sees it, the way to deal with both challenges – the well-meaning but baroque obfuscations, and the jeering hostility that they so often provoke – is to focus on argument.

Finding the argument is at the heart of her strategy when working with a speaker. Many of her business clients give her what they see as a speech structure; she recognises it as “a record of their thinking process, culminating in the main message. The task of the speechwriter is to flip the order, and make sure the main message is up the front and structures the entire speech.”

This approach brings to mind Barbara Minto – whom Dr Holdforth mentions in passing – and her famous Pyramid Principle, born of McKinsey and now ubiquitous in the corporate universe, if still rarely followed. Too many corporate communications managers, for instance, supply speechwriters with lists of bullet points described as the ‘outline’ of a speech. “Joining the dots,” writes Dr Holdforth, “just creates a list of ideas, not an argument.”

“A leader’s speech works best as the resolved product of thinking, not a record of the thinking process. The voice of reason has an integrity and a sense of resolution… Speechwriting is no a transcription services, but a creation service. The words don’t just reflect an idea; very often, they also shape and crystallise it.”

Here is a rhetorician boldly reasserting the centrality of what Cicero called invention in rhetorical practice. “This clarity of writing,” she says, “is about more than just a modern and mobile style. It is a form of ethics.” A well argued speech provokes counter-argument and debate, the very life blood of democracy. Rhetoric without argument is facile and trivial. But we who value rhetoric, she says, must not succumb to despair in the face of Etonian classical allusions or incoherent ranting.

“The answer to rhetoric that we don’t like … is … not less rhetoric, it’s more and better rhetoric.”

Everything in a speech – the speaker’s authority, the stories they tell, the emotions they conjure – everything derives from their core argument. That argument must also address the beliefs and values underlying an audience’s cynicism. “Any thorough argument,” writes Dr Holdforth, “must increasingly go back to basics and question the underlying assumptions” She invokes Stephen Toulmin’s warrant-based model of argumentation to support her thesis.

Leaders, of course, must also tell stories. Dr Holdforth sees that stories supply our deep need for meaning, so any story that the leader tells must knit with a robust argument to supply that meaning.  She points out, strikingly, that the argument will often itself supply the emotion that lifts a speech. “Clients tell me they want their speech to have stories with passion,” she writes, “as if passion were an ornament that you could paste on any old speech draft, rather than the intellectual energy driving and shaping it.”

She’s particularly good on ceremonial speeches. “Many of us,” she writes, “live in a lonely and godless world, and we hunger for ceremonies that lend significance to our days.” But, in fact, “few occasions reveal deep, underlying divisions and discord more than a ceremonial event.” The job of a ceremonial speech is not so much to generate energy as to channel the energy already in the room: “to tap into that energy and reflect it back to the audience.” The speaker should remind us “why we love each other despite our flaws, and stick together despite our differences.” The speech, she says, “becomes a form of communion.”

So, in this new book, Lucinda Holdforth supplies a rich mix of method and experience. Where Lehrman’s book is like taking a training course, Leading Lines is like an apprenticeship. If you’re a professional speechwriter, buy two copies: one for yourself and one for your speaker. (Bookmark the opening of Chapter 4 for their attention.) Keep it close at hand; you’ll find yourself coming back to it. Leading Lines is a book that just keeps giving.

‘So what do you do?’: the 19th European Speechwriters’ Conference, Paris, 25 September 2019

What’s the collective noun for a group of speechwriters?

A proclamation? A peroration? A paradox, perhaps?

Speechwriting is, after all, a profession full of contradictions. Speechwriters craft public language and lurk in the shadows; they crave close access to their speakers and often see their texts mangled by cloth-eared apparatchiks. They need to be agile networkers, and they work - for hours and hours - alone.

A collective of speechwriters might seem an oxymoron.

Which is why the very concept of a speechwriters’ conference promises intrigue and surprise. Both were evident at the 19^th conference of the European Speechwriters’ Network, held in September 2019 at the Irish Cultural Institute in Paris.

 

The location was apposite. Last year, French speechwriters founded La Guilde des Plumes, which is rapidly establishing itself as the francophone companion organisation of the ESN. Members of the guild attended the September conference, contributing to a day of rich conversation, both on and off the platform.

You might expect the conversation to be wide-ranging. But you might not expect the sheer enjoyment that invariably bubbles up, the moment these people get together. Forget the bottom-numbing, tunnel-vision specialism of most professional conferences. ESN conferences are fun. (Guy Doza’s puckish chairing in Paris set the tone.) Speechwriters are a motley band with a wide range of responsibilities; and every good speechwriter has a healthy obsession with ‘general knowledge’. You can never tell where the conversation might turn.

 

 

Melanie Dunn’s briskly stimulating talk opened the proceedings, distilling impressive experience into a checklist of necessary skills, amounting to a virtual job description. Speechwriters, she told us, need to be able to absorb, sponge-like, vast amounts of information, and then distil it into three crisp ideas. Melanie notices a new requirement, too: the ability to navigate social media and online analytics.

 

 

Speechwriters - whether political or corporate - must also integrate with the culture in which they work – while often finding themselves isolated. (Another paradox.) During the day, we encountered cultures aplenty. This is a truly European network: French, Danish, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch – the list goes on, and includes Americans, Canadians and others.

Then there’s the Irish connection. Tom Moylan mischievously suggested that his country’s heritage gave it several linguistic headstarts over the English. (Gaelic has given English numerous words, including ‘Tory’.) Ireland has a noble storytelling tradition: every leader or taoiseach, throughout history, has had his file (pronounced ‘filly’), a prophetic poet who foretold the future in verse or riddle.

Speechwriters, Tom suggested, could well transfer some of the core conventions of that tradition into their own practice: be humble (never begin until you’ve been asked, three times); open innocuous but intriguing; and don’t protest if you’re interrupted.

Pauline Genee, who writes speeches for Dutch politicians, brought her expertise as a novelist to the conversation. Focus on conflict and character, she told us.

 

Don’t be afraid of simple formulas. A wants B and is prevented by C; without that dynamic, a rambling narrative will never become a compelling tale.

Sometimes the story explodes in front of us. Kevin Toolis considered how leaders respond to a crisis: a sudden, overwhelming, threatening event. The purpose of a catastrophe speech must be to restore authority, order and calm in the face of incipient violence or chaos. It needs to be delivered immediately; time, Kevin told us, is your enemy. This is a dangerous, risky speech to write – the world is listening – but it’s unavoidable if you want to capture the narrative.

 

His example was Tony Blair’s speech on the morning of Princess Diana’s death: forged at white heat with Alistair Campbell in the night watches after the fateful car accident; perfectly framed (Blair stops off, on a damp Sunday morning, as he takes his family to church in Sedgefield); and performed – there is no other word – with pinpoint precision, complete with careful hesitations and a voice breaking with emotion.

That speech did its job perfectly. And every speech, as Peggy Noonan reminded us via Melanie Dunn, has a job to do. Foregrounding the task of persuading an audience over the bland delivery of complex information can be tricky, especially when your principal is a pathologically cautious banker.

A number of European central banks were represented in the audience; and, on the platform, Antonia Fleischmann painted a vivid picture of her role at the Bundesbank. Her job is to help the bank maintain trust. When so many speeches from central bankers are so alike, markets can move on the substitution of an exclamation mark for a full stop. (These speeches are also scrutinised in transcript.)

 

Antonia sits with market analysts – rather than her comms colleagues – so that she can understand the mind-boggling complexities of international finance. She’s learnt that, if you want to convince economists of the virtues of clear language, the best tools are data-driven text analytics and readability statistics.

Improv, on the other hand, might not cut it with financiers. But there’s no reason why speechwriters shouldn’t try a bit of stand-up. In one of the afternoon breakout sessions, Alexandra Fresse-Eliazord – who has assembled a collection of 300 drama exercises – cajoled a group of us into making up stories from scratch. Composing extempore can help bring written speeches to life.

 

Of course, we need to balance spontaneity with attention to structure and style. At ESN conferences, the rhetorical tradition, from Aristotle onwards, is never far from the surface. Imogen Morley took another breakout group through a lively analysis of a speech by Hilary Clinton to demonstrate how studying good speeches from the past, far from being a dry academic exercise, can generate new ideas.

 

Even tennis can provide valuable insights. Jennifer Migan – herself a professional tennis player turned speechwriter and coach – explained how the skill of reading your opponent on the court can become the skill of empathy with a speaker who might find it hard to open up with a writer.

 

 

In the end, of course, it all comes back to language. The words have to work hard. Writing for a Chinese corporation, Jennifer told us, meant focusing on the company vision and ruthlessly excising any content that didn’t fit. Writing for a prominent speaker in Doha, Melanie Dunn explained, meant exchanging punchy arguments and explicit emotion for the poetry of Arabic and a shimmering presentational image for the speaker. In a one-party state, as one delegate explained to me over coffee, the task of a public speech is simply to fill the void.

And working in France, as Lucie Robin explained in the day’s keynote talk (more mischief: Lucie's chosen title was Know Your Enemy) means understanding how eloquence in French is closely codified and monitored. The French take pride in their language and value the appearance of smartness (don’t take out the long words; add to them). Avoid the taboos (money; religion); cultivate wit (l’esprit). Above all, treat your audience with maximum respect.

It’s a sobering thought. At a moment when public discourse in English is suffering from a surfeit of bad manners, we anglophones would do well to remember that the language of diplomacy is founded firmly on French. We need to find a new public language: principled, nuanced, collaborative. And speechwriters could have a leading role in establishing it.

The European Speechwriter Network holds its next conference at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 1, 2 and 3 April, 2020. To book a place, email [email protected].

 

 

At the cutting edge: the British Science Festival Award Lectures, 2019

Mid-September, and it’s time again for the British Science Festival.

For the last five years, I’ve been working with the winners of this year’s Award Lectures, the festival’s flagship events. In July, we met in London to share and develop our ideas; now, as summer gives way to the stimulating nip of autumn, I’m at the University of Warwick to see cutting-edge science celebrated and witness some of the best science communication around.

The Award Lectures have been presented by the British Science Association (the BSA) since 1990. The awards recognise and promote pivotal research being carried out in the UK by early-career scientists. Notable past Award Lecture winners include Professor Brian Cox (2006), Maggie Aderin-Pocock (2008) and Richard Wiseman (2002).  The awards cover the full spectrum of scientific endeavour; the names of the awards themselves honour eminent scientists in each field.

I’ve already interviewed each lecturer. (Click through on each name to find more.) This week, I’ll be blogging about the lectures themselves on the BSA blog, exploring not just the sheer excitement of the science but also the lessons the lectures offer about best-practice science communication.

Take a look at what’s covered at this year’s festival – and then book your tickets.

Tuesday 10 September, 1100

Are we alone in the universe?

Dr Sarah Rugheimer of the University of Oxford, is the Rosalind Franklin Award Lecture winner for Physical Sciences and Mathematics. Dr Rugheimer is an astrophysicist and the 2018 Caroline Herschel Prize winner for Promising Female Junior Astronomer in the UK. She uses ultraviolet radiation to seek out signs of life on exoplanets. Her work may help us answer the ultimate question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

 

Book tickets

 

Wednesday 11  September, 1100

Unwell in unrest

Dr Mohammed Jawad, of Imperial College London, is the Charles Darwin Award Lecture winner for Agriculture, Biological and Medical Sciences. Dr Jawad uses big data to probe the long-term and often hidden effects of war and conflict on public health. Just about half the world’s population is affected in some way by war; yet,beyond the obvious violence, surprisingly little is known about how conflict damages us. Dr Jawad’s work could have profound implications for the effectiveness of humanitarian aid and advocacy.

Book tickets

 

Wednesday 11 September, 1300

When children became evil

Dr Laura Tisdall, of Queen Mary University of London, is the Jacob Bronowski Award Lecture winner for Science and the Arts. Dr Tisdall’s lecture delves into the curious phenomenon of evil children – although Laura prefers to call them ‘extraordinary’ – in post-war horror films and popular culture. These fictional children seem to reflect society’s anxieties about childhood, child-rearing and – intriguingly – educational policy during the period. And those anxieties may still colour our attitudes to childhood today.

Book tickets

 

Thursday 12 September, 1100

Smaller, smarter, better

Dr Jessica Boland, of the University of Manchester, is the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture winner for Engineering, Technology and Industry. Dr Boland studies nanomaterials, which have properties at the sub-microscopic level (think one billionth of a metre – if you can). These materials is managing to probe the very odd ways in which these materials behave, in pursuit of new technologies that could transform food production, medicine, pollution control and wireless communication.

 

Book tickets

 

Friday 13 September, 1100

The dark heart of the ocean

Dr Diva Amon, of the Natural History Museum, London, is the Charles Lyell Award Lecture winner for Environmental Sciences. We know less about the deep ocean than about the surface of Mars. Dr Amon wants to put this right, not least because this extraordinary environment is increasingly vulnerable to destruction by deep-sea mining. By discovering and examining new species, Diva is paving the way to a better understanding of this remarkable landscape and ultimately, its management.

Book tickets

 

Friday 13 September 1300

Pocket blood tests

Dr Stuart Higgins, of Imperial College London, is the Daphne Oram Award Lecture winner for Digital Innovation. Many complex medical conditions demand complex diagnostic tests. Dr Higgins is using bioelectronics materials to create innovative technology that might perform several diagnostic tests simultaneously – opening up the possibility of self-diagnosis via an app on your smartphone. One size fits all? Stuart will look at the potential and the possible risks of this exciting idea.

Book tickets

 

Six patterns of explanation

[image: DrAfter123 / Getty Images]

We understand information by pattern-matching. If you can organise information into a simple pattern that your audience or reader can recognise, they'll be better prepared to understand it.

For instance, we can explain in six different ways. I have no idea who first created this list of patterns, but my hunch is that it appeared at some point in the early nineteenth century. The list varies slightly from textbook to textbook; this is the version I've found most useful over the years.

Example

Categorising

Definition

Comparison and contrast

Cause and effect

Chronological or process pattern

Get to know these patterns. They'll help you explain anything more clearly.

 

Example

Explanation by example, probably the simplest pattern, creates a list. Examples can help make an idea concrete by creating a mental image.

Journey times for passengers are just about keeping to expected levels on all Tube lines. The Metropolitan, East London, Northern and Piccadilly all report additional excess journey time averages. The Bakerloo, Victoria and District Lines showed the most marked improvement during the Christmas period. 

Signal words for explanation by example include:

• in addition
• another
• for example
• also
• several
• a number of

This pattern could be presented graphically as a bullet list. (Like the one above!)

 

Categorising

We humans seem to have a natural talent for sorting information into categories.  Categories are created by dividing information into parts. This pattern follows three rules.

• Every item under consideration should fit into one of your categories.  If you have odd items left over, add other categories or rework your existing categories. 
• Categories should not overlap.
• Items should fit into only one category.  If you cannot decide where to put something, ask if it can be eliminated as irrelevant, or whether it needs a category to itself.

Give each category a clear name.  Sub-categories will come under larger categories with more general names.

Put things, people, places, into categories based on their similarities. Alternatively, you could take one thing, person, place and divide it into its components.

Make the purpose of classification clear and interesting. A paper classifying the different areas to study in college is not very interesting. A paper classifying the different types of sexism in the classroom is interesting.

Explain how you have created your categories. Include the rule or principle used to classify items into groups. Use examples, details, and data to help readers distinguish between categories.

Playing fields may be owned by private or public landholders. Private owners include companies, banks, sports clubs, developers, or individual land owners not necessarily associated with any commercial enterprise. Public owners include local authorities, schools, colleges or other public sector bodies such as the Civil Service or National Health Service.

Signal words and phrases or categorising include:

• include
• exclude
• not limited to
• can be divided into
• types of
• sorts of

Categorising could be represented graphically by a pie chart.

 

 

Definition

A definition identifies something uniquely: an object, a procedure, a term or a concept.  There are three types of definition.

• A short definition explains by means of a synonymous word or phase, often in brackets or between commas. 
• A sentence definition is made up of two sections: the class to which the object belongs; and the features which distinguish it from all other items in the class.  A glossary is made up of sentence definitions. 
• An extended definition can be short as a paragraph or as long as a chapter.  It may include a brief history of the term (the language it came from, its current use, how the use has changed).  An extended definition should also include the object's function.

ROI for tourism is the amount of additional visitor expenditure that campaigns generate compared with the amount of public money invested in these campaigns. 

Explore a subject’s meaning fully. Differences within the definition are fine if they exist within the established boundaries.

Draw clear boundaries around the defined subject to avoid confusion with other subjects. Use examples, details, and anecdotes to strengthen your definition.

Signal words and phrases  for definition include:

• is defined as
• means
• is described as
• is called
• refers to
• term
• concept

I haven't ever found a good visual or graphic representation of definition. A Venn diagram might be helpful. On the other hand:

Comparison and contrast

Comparisons display the similarities between things; contrasts show the differences.  You can use them separately, or together: comparison before contrast.

In our view, the CEE regional businesses share similar growth drivers, in particular robust regional economic outlooks, high growth advertising markets,operational synergies as part of the MTG group,regulatory changes and the launch of niche channels.

The variance in availability of playing fields between inner and outer London is marked. In theory, there are 227 playing fields available to residents in inner London boroughs, as opposed to 1,202 available to residents in outer London.   We discuss availability in theoretical terms because availability does not necessarily equate to accessibility. There are issues around access for local people, who may find themselves deprived of access for a variety of reasons.

The items under consideration must be comparable.  You would not compare the costs of freight haulage by rail in the UK to container haulage to Australia by ship. Establish the criteria by which you are comparing and contrasting.  Have as many as possible: cost, convenience, prestige, size, security, safety and so on. Rank the criteria in priority order.  This might be a controversial exercise, but unless the criteria are weighted you will not be able to contract them effectively.

State a clear purpose regarding why the subjects are being compared or contrasted at the beginning of the paper. Explaining the differences between summer and winter, however well written or spoken, must also be interesting.

Share enough features to make a comparison valuable. Choose a narrow enough basis for comparing or contrasting, so that all major similarities and differences can be covered.

Signal words and phrases for comparison and contrast include:

• similar, different
• on the other hand
• but
• however
• bigger than, smaller than
• in the same way
• parallel

Comparison and contrast can be presented graphically as a table.

[image from allcameradriver.com]

 

Cause and effect

Cause and effect explains why something happened. 

The difficulty, of course, is in deciding which is cause and which is effect! A cause is so often the effect of another cause, which may be harder to determine or control.  Look for the immediate cause; the underlying cause; and the ultimate cause.  Your analysis will be circumscribed by the areas of responsibility involved.

The breakdown in communications within the London Ambulance service had an impact on the service’s ability effectively to deploy the necessary vehicles, personnel, equipment and supplies to the incidents.  Survivors told us repeatedly of their surprise at the apparent lack of ambulances at the scenes, even an hour or more after the explosions. 

Cause and effect is a technique fraught with danger.  Determine which type of cause you are searching for: immediate, underlying or ultimate.  What is your purpose in identifying these causes?  Be open-minded.  Try not to rush to conclusions or to allocate blame 'politically'.  Be as logical as you can.  Eliminate coincidence.  Take all factors into account.  Is there more than one cause?  Are there other effects that you have not considered?  Trace all the links.  Go as far back as necessary (or as is expedient!) to the ultimate cause.

The robust advertising growth will be largely driven by demand from both local and multinational advertisers, buoyed by deregulation and relatively stable economic conditions.

Signal words for cause and effect explanation include:

• for this reason
• consequently
• as a result
• on that account
• hence
• because

Cause and effect can be represented graphically by a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram. This is also a useful tool for establishing causes of a problem.

 

 

Chronological or process pattern

Items are listed in the order in which they occurred or in a specifically planned order in which they must develop.  In this form of explanation, the order is vital; changing it would change the explanation's meaning.

A process pattern lists all the steps necessary to carry out an operation.  It may take the form of a set of instructions (like a recipe), a quality procedure or a technical specification report.  It proceeds step by step.  The steps must occur in a particular order: if the order is wrong, the operation will fail. 

The proposed timetable is as follows:

Scoping brief to Chair on 7 April;

Project Initiation meeting at 10am on 11 April;

Scoping brief to Members on 12 April;

Despatch call for evidence letters by 21 April;

Written evidence received by 26 May;

Evidence analysed and briefing paper prepared for Members by 5 July;

Evidentiary Hearing 13 July;

Formal approval of scrutiny report at 12 October Committee meeting

Process analysis usually tells the reader about a process or how to do it. 

In calculating the cost of capital, we compute the split of earnings between domestic and international operations, which after the deconsolidation of the Argentinean subsidiaries comprise mainly Brazil. To calculate the cost of capital of the domestic operations, we add the eurobond yield of 3.64% to the Italian equity risk premium of 4.0%. To calculate the cost of capital of the international operations, we add the Brazil short term interest rate of 30% to the country risk premium of 6%. Lastly, we calculate the weighted capital obtained on a earnings basis.

Instructions tend to be far more detailed explanations.

Signal words and phrases for chronological or process explanation include:

• first, second, third
• first, secondly, thirdly
• next
• before
• after
• when
• later
• until
• at last

Chronological explanation could be presented graphically as a timetable -

- or as a timeline:

A set of instructions will be laid out as a numbered list - like a recipe:

Note that the list of ingredients here is explanation by example. The method is organised as a process. The distinction between the two is made even clearer by the use of bullets for the list of examples, and of numbers for the process. 

Notice also that lists of instructions are not necessarily in process order.

(And please do not try to iron your backside, even on a low heat.)

I run training courses on effective writing email and letter writing, report writing and grammar. Contact me to find out more.

 

 

 

How to submit a proposal for a scicomm presentation

[image via http://www.communicatescience.eu with thanks]

The British Science Association is calling for applications for sessions at the 2019 British Science Festival, to be held in September at the University of Warwick. Maybe you're interested in applying. Maybe you're applying to another sciccomm event somewhere. Maybe you're just starting out planning one. Whatever your interest, these notes will help you hone your application.

We'll go through  a series of six questions. At this stage, you need only simple answers. You’re not planning your presentation yet, only putting together the proposal. If you can be clear about this key elements, your proposal will be more convincing and attractive.

 

What's your goal?

A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the US suggested that science communicators typically have one or more of these five goals. I see them sitting on a spectrum with 'pure' science at one end and more or less strong social advocacy at the other.

Notice that all five goals relate to your audience - not to your subject. As we move along the spectrum, think about how - and how much - you might want to involve your audience in the presentation.

Sharing the excitement of science

Nothing wrong with that. We can all get far too hung up on relevance and social impact. Science is amazing. Celebrate it.

To increase appreciation for science as a useful way to make sense of the world

Perhaps you're assuming that, once your audience understands more about a subject, they'll be more willing to act on that knowledge. Not an unreasonable assumption, although the NAS report says that it's not yet been fully tested.

To increase understanding of the science related to a specific issue

Similar to the last goal, but in this case, you're tackling a specific issue and trying to educate your audience about the relevant facts. At this point on the spectrum, controversy raises its head - and not just from the audience's side. We're talking here about the 'deficit' model of scicomm, which assumes that “the science” of a controversial issue is settled, that the experts accept it without question and that the task of communication is simply to explain the facts to an ignorant public. Many scientists hold this as a mental model. And, as the report points out, it's false. You want to increase knowledge and understanding of GM foods by simply presenting the facts? You may face resistance.

To influence people’s opinions, behavior, and policy preferences

Moving further along the spectrum, at this point you want to do more than present the facts. You want to influence. You have scientific evidence clearly showing that certain choices or policies have more positive social consequences. You'll need to relate the facts to the audience's priorities, values and beliefs. You need to translate information into ideas, and evidence into meaning. You need to start advocating. And that means, in part, countering misinformation.

To engage with groups from within society, to acknowledge their views on the science of a specific issue, in pursuit of solutions that everyone can accept

Similar to the last goal, but now your audience is more distinctly defined. Maybe you're talking to young people about sexual health; or parents about vaccination; or faith groups about evolution. At this point on the spectrum, your presentation must definitely be part of a dialogue.

Another way of thinking about your purpose is to ask: What do I want my audience to think, feel and do?

• Think

What do you want the audience to know by the end? What do you want the audience to think about as they leave? How do you want them to think differently about the topic? What’s the ‘aha’ or the ‘so what’? What information or ideas do you want to reinforce – or demolish – in the audience’s mind?

• Feel

What emotion or response do you want to evoke? What feeling do you most want to associate with your topic? Do you want people to feel hopeful? Angry? Provoked? Confident? Scared? Do you want them to feel motivated, energised or inspired? Presumably you want them to feel entertained throughout – and not baffled or bored. And presentations that deliver unmitigated doom and despair are probably not going to be very motivational.

• Do

What specific action do you want the audience to take? Do you want them to change their lifestyle? Is there a specific “to-do” or next step? Is there something they need to change? Do they need to demand change from their political representatives, or their employers, or their families? What do you want people to go out and share with others?  The best calls to action are clear and simple.

[Thanks to Linhart PR for some inspiration here – and for the cool image.]

Now focus on the specific rhetorical aim of your presentation. What do you want your presentation to do? My guess is that it will do one of two things.

It will seek either to persuade or to explain.

Try to pick one - and only one - of those options.

If you think you want to persuade your audience of something, then you will need to construct an argument and then support it in various ways. We can argue in two ways. You'll also need to think about how to persuade using means other than logical argument.

If you think that you want to explain something, then try to decide what type of explanation you want to use. There are six types of explanation.

You can think about all this in more detail later, when you start planning. For now, focus on the key question: persuade or explain?

 

Who's your audience?

Think about and define your audience as clearly as you can. The festival or organisation you’re proposing to should be able to give you a reasonably clear profile of your audience. The BSA profiles the audience for the British Science Festival as

non-specialist adults (16+) with a broad interest in science

Which is pretty broad. You may have a more specific audience in mind: parents, perhaps; teachers; children; people with a particular need; faith leaders; community leaders; other scientists.

What are likely to be your audience’s preconceptions about the subject you’re presenting? Can you pin down those preconceptions any more tightly than using anecdotal evidence or your own hunches?

 

What is your message?

We’re aiming here for a single-sentence take-away.What's the 'so what' here?

Imagine an audience member being asked by an outsider as they leave: “What was the key message of that session?” What would you want them to say?

Try to sum up the take-home message of your presentation in a single sentence.

 

What's the title?

If you are asked for a title, it should be a compressed version of that message. The title should be intriguing and attractive, but it shouldn’t be vague or baffling. Titles are hard. Don’t feel, at this stage, that you have to come up with a brilliant title. Take a look at the titles of the posts on the BSA blog. You could also consider a two-part title. For example:

'You go first': public perceptions of risk in an uncertain world

Who's in the driving seat? managing epilepsy at DVLA

Magic mushrooms: how fungi can save the world

 

What's your structure?

Remember, at this point you don't need a detailed plan. But you do need a rough idea of the shape of the presentation.

Think about this in two stages.

Divergent thinking first: gather loads of ideas and map them out. Tke your time over this stage, and enjoy it. You can indulge in the luxury of not having to decide on a final structure.

 

You might want to think about specific types of information. The application form might ask, for example, about the new areas or trends in your area of research; about whether your work is being sponsored by anyone; about any publications or other ways you have promoted your work.

But think also about some of the key elements you'd love to include: any 'wow' moments you might want to deliver, or brilliant examples; images or stories; one-liners that have worked for you in the past.

At some point, transform your divergent thinking into convergent thinking.

Look for the end point of the presentation: where do you want your audience to arrive when you finish?

And the start point: where can you imagine your audience standing in relation to this subject at the beginning?

Then think about the journey. How are you going to take the audience from start point to finish point?

Now at this point, as you might imagine, storytelling comes in. But I don't want to get into detail about that - not here.

But let me leave you with just a hint.

The journey is the audience's journey.

Not yours.

Your task is to show the way and help them when the going gets a bit tough.

And at this point we shall take a pause. You’re not required to plan your presentation in detail right now. Your task is to sell it to the festival organisers. The simplest outline of your presentation’s structure is enough. And it’s likely to change as you develop the idea, anyway.

What's the blurb?

You may well be asked for a blurb as part of your application: 50 words that give an impression of the presentation and what it will be like.

This blurb will probably be used for marketing your presentation. Use all your work up to this point to create that 50-word summary. Don’t feel that you must include every element of the structure in that summary; blurbs should entice and intrigue by indicating the questions to be asked or the mystery to be solved – without including the answer or the solution.

Here are some blurbs from recent sessions at the British Science Festival, slightly adapted. They tend to follow predictable patterns.

First, a blurb that begins with a simple statement of fact.

Statistics supply vital evidence to shape public policy. Laura Bonnett has been working to influence DVLA policy on granting licences to drivers who’ve suffered seizures. In the Rosalind Franklin Award Lecture at this year’s British Science Festival, she will take us through the process.

 

Robots are set to play an increasingly important role in our lives. What is the future of robotics? Greg Toland from Innovate UK will show us a world that's stranger and less frightening than we might think.

Or you might start by simply stating your name and what you're doing.

Dr Emma Yhnell is looking for ways to build brain resilience in people living with Huntington’s using computer games. She explained more in the Charles Darwin Award Lecture at this year’s British Science Festival.

Your blurb might begin with stating a problem.

Detecting brain damage in newborns is notoriously difficult. Gemma Bale of UCL is helping to develop an innovative method for investigating brain activity – using infrared light. Her area of research that promises to give new hope to babies and their families.

 

Biodiversity is under threat around the planet. Claire Burke is helping to pioneer a new field to help prevent poaching and possible future extinctions – and it’s called astroecology. In the Daphne Oram Award Lecture at this year’s British Science Festival, Claire will introduce and illustrate her work.

 

In today’s social and political climate, the idea of ‘fake news’ is on everybody’s mind - the idea that the lines between truth and lies are being blurred by higher powers. But how do we define a lie - or the truth? In this session, Jennifer Parrott will seek some answers.

Your blurb might challenge received wisdom.

Being fat is unhealthy, yes? Well, not quite. And it certainly isn’t an ‘epidemic’. Dr Oli Williams believes that we need to rethink our approach to weight. In the Margaret Mead Award Lecture for social sciences at this year’s British Science Festival, Oli will challenge some of our most fundamental assumptions about obesity.

If you want to go further, this post looks at messages in more detail; this one and this one explore how to structure the presentation; and this one lists seven ways in which you can bring your ideas to life.

I work with presenters at the British Science Festival each year, helping them to develop their ideas and design their presentations. If you'd like to do the same, contact me by posting a comment on this site, finding me on LinkedIn or sending me an email.

 

 

 

Presenting science: finding the structure

[image: Harish Krishna on Flikr]

In the previous two posts of this series, I’ve outlined some of the challenges facing scientists presenting to a non-specialist audience, and the need for a clear message. Once you've clarified your message, you need to find the structure that will work best for it.

The thoughts in this final post arise from my work with the seven Award Lecturers at this year’s British Science Festival (2018, at the University of Hull).They were consistently inspiring.

When I’m working with scientists on scicomm presentations, creating the structure is usually the most exciting part of the job. Every presentation takes its own shape, and our task is to discover that structure together.

So making rules about structure is pretty well impossible. But I think we can lay down three broad principles.

First, the presentation structures that succeed are always dynamic. They move in some way from beginning to end. That movement might be a straight line; it may be a tortuous meander; it may be a journey that suddenly changes direction.

Now, you could present your research as a journey. Simply adapt the structure of a research paper:

• Introduction (what was the problem?)
• Methodology (what did you do?)
• Results (What did you find?)
• Discussion (what did you think about it?)
• Conclusion (what have you proved?)

This is the classic IMRAD structure. And it might work for the audience in a scientific conference. That’s to say: it’s likely to make them feel comfortable and safe and maybe a bit sleepy…

But IMRAD is unlikely to work with a non-specialist audience. The problem is that the place where your research starts is unlikely to be a place that non-specialists would recognise or understand.

You have to start somewhere the audience finds familiar.

And then you have to entertain them.

Deep down, every audience wants a performance. Think of a simple tune, or a joke, or a magic trick. (Good science demos, of course, are very like magic tricks.) They all arouse expectations, and then fulfil them. Many scientific presentations are static: they’re all fulfilment.  (‘Make your point, then give the evidence.’). Your structure has to set up an expectation - and then fulfil it. For many researchers, this realisation is often an 'aha!' moment.

The structure you're looking for, then, is dynamic. It must move. It's not the structure of a paper; it's the structure of a performance.

All gripping performances contain moments of suspense and surprise. Create a mystery.  The more intriguing, the better. (Think of all those science documentaries in which, about halfway through, the narrator’s voice deepens and we hear the words: “And at that point they discovered something utterly astounding.”) It doesn’t have to be a burning controversy.  A life cycle with intriguing gaps; an ancient manufacturing process that remains a mystery to this very day; a mismatch between theory and findings; all of these can give you the hook that will capture your audience’s attention.  

Or think of a story. Every story follows a similar structure.

• Situation: which everyone in the audience recognises.
• Problem: which complicates the situation and makes in interesting, adding tension.
• Question: how is the crisis going to be resolved?
• Response: “…and they all lived happily ever after/… and the beast was slain/ … and the hero discovered something new about himself/herself/the world.”

There are plenty of models around to help you develop a narrative. Take a look at the the Freytag Triangle, ‘SPQR’; and Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. The trick is to ask what would work for your audience: what stories work for them? Look for the points of arousal in your narrative: the moments of mystery, choice, uncertainty, conflict. (“Why did that happen? Why did that fail? How can we fix this?”)

Arrange your structure around these turning points.  (I sometimes call them ‘hinges’.)

Second, narrative isn’t everything.  Scicomm practitioners and consultants can become obsessed with storytelling. But other kinds of discourse can perform. Some kinds of explanation, for example, are inherently dynamic. Think of contrast (the difference between then and now, here and there, us and them). Cause and effect, too, can be gripping, especially if the effect is surprising. (Science demos, again...) A process, by contrast, might be dynamic but it probably lacks suspense or surprise (and a process that involves conflict probably isn’t a very effective process). Lists of examples and carefully organised categories tend to be utterly boring. (Especially on slides.)

Argument, of course, is packed with drama. Make a striking or controversial claim, and your audience will be gripped.

Third, let your intuition help you.  Caroline Goyder suggests factoring in dream time.  Create a loose framework, she says, “as soon as the invitation to present goes in the diary.” “Once you have that frame,” she says, “your unconscious will get to work and the idea will grow, even while you’re doing other things.”  I’d also suggest talking your material through with a (preferably non-scientific) friend.  Where do their eyes light up?  What fascinates them?  Those moments are potential hinges.

Discovering the structure that makes a science presentation fizz is one of the most exciting parts of my job. We never know what that structure will be when we start exploring. But we always know it when we find it.

What's your message?: finding the foundation of a great science presentation

This is the second of three posts.

What makes for a zingy science presentation?

In my previous post, I highlighted the need for scicomm practitioners to answer the ‘so what?’ question. How can we produce a science presentation that’s truly meaningful for a non-specialist audience?

The sessions that I’ve seen in the last two days all delivered simple messages. It was the clarity of those messages that made them satisfying and enjoyable. We took them away with us. They were truly take-home messages.

The message depends more on your audience than it does on your subject matter. Every ordinary presentation talks about something. Every extraordinary presentation talks to its audience.

So how do you find a good message?

It's a matter of pulling focus. Start broad and narrow your thinking down.

Start with your subject. What are you talking about?

Ok. Now put that question behind you. You're not going to talk about anything. You're going to find interesting and meaningful things to say to your audience.

Now ask: who's my audience? Think about their likely demographics. Think about their general beliefs and attitudes, especially about the subject you’re tackling. (Vaccination? Climate change? Masculinity? There will be attitudes, beliefs and prejudices swirling around…) Think, too, about how they might think about you. And think about the hidden audience: on social media, in the press, or around the festival or event where you’re speaking.

You’ll be able to use all of this information in the presentation itself. For example, you can use it to help you identify – or seem to identify – with the audience. You could use information about the audience itself in the presentation. And you could use questions or statements generated by the audience themselves at some point. But all this is for later. Let’s come back to the message.

So: now identify your objective. How do you want to influence the audience? The simple answer is almost certainly that you will want to either explain or persuade. You can do both, but not at the same time! Try to decide which of these two is your overall objective.

And now, identify your topic. This is your position on the subject, where you stand in relation to it in the presentation. (The word comes from the Greek word topos, meaning ‘place’.) A quick short cut to a topic is to write down a phrase beginning with the word ‘how’ or the word ‘why’. One session today had the topic: “why our approach to obesity is wrong”. Another had the topic: “how we can strengthen our immune system’s ability to remember pathogens”.  A third was: “how brain training might help people living with Huntington’s disease”.

Now put the topic and the objective together. (They should of course make sense already in relation to each other.) Find the sentence that expresses your message, and delivers your objective, as simply as it can. In the cases I’ve mentioned, we can simply remove the initial words.

Our approach to obesity is wrong. [Persuading]

We can strengthen the immune system’s memory. [Explaining]

Brain training may be able to help people living with Huntington’s disease. [Explaining]

Your message is the foundation on which all the rest of the presentation will be built. And if you’re wondering where to put the message – At the beginning? In the middle? At the end? – then you’re ready to move on to the next stage of constructing a meaningful and entertaining science presentation: you’re thinking about structure.

And we’ll deal with that in the next post.

Thoughts on speechwriting: Philip Collins

 

A selection of comments on speechwriting from Philip Collins' new book, When They Go Low, We Go High.

Numbers in  brackets are page numbers where the quotes appear.

You can find a review of the book here.

 

 

 

The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but aat the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.(11)

An audience gets only one hearing, and pictures dwell longer in the mind than abstract arguments. (24)

It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you. (27)

… the speech conciliated opposing parties. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which the speaker can be pinned down… This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say. (32) [Thomas Jefferson, 4 March 1801]

Blessings and happiness should find their way back into our rhetoric. (35)

Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights. (40)

A smooth transition is one of a speech’s technical problems and Lincoln here packs it into a single word. (43) [Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address; the word is 'consecrate']

Speeches should accelerate, intellectually and audibly, as they come to their end. (43)

A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. (48)

One of the dangers of rhetoric … is that it can run away with the speaker. (51)

Occasion matters to the verdict of greatness. (55)

Obama is the master of the glorious compromise, the beautiful consensus, the slow change that lifts the heart. (61)

Respect your occasion. (66)

Rhetoric cannot work when the phrases are too lavish for their topic. (87)

Poor speakers try to rouse the audience with only a rising intonation and an increased volume at the end of a line, but the applause will only ever be resounding when the vocal trickery is deployed for an important, completed thought. (107)

The composer of a speech always faces a question about where to locate the best line. Should it come, like their finest hour, at the end? Should it open the speech? Or should it be… buried in the text? (120)

Soft-pedalling on a crucial point gets you a reputation as a fraud. A reward greets being candid. (133)

Character is a set of virtues we display which add up to who we are. But we also use the word  ‘character’ to describe a figure in fiction. That usage too is relevant to rhetoric, and it is highly relevant to the imagined community of a nation. (169)

Criticism is better countered if it is named honestly. (171)

Franklin is not only talking about an open mind. He is dramatizing an open mind. The axiom of the novelist and the screen-weriter – show, don’t tell – applies to the good speechweriter too. (176) [17 September 1787]

Every speech ever made has one of three possible functions: to change knowledge, perception or behaviour. (177)

A trial defence rests more on the character of the plaintiff than any other rhetorical form. (193)

These are brave words on an extraordinary occasion, which is the essence of a great speech. (200) [Nelson Mandela, 20 April 1964]

In situations of political oppression and adversity much has to be said by implication and allusion, allegory or metaphor. It would be dangerous to spell out the implications. A metaphor requires the listener to rewrite the speech’s meaning as he or she listens. (205)

Scriptwriters and playwrights hide plot twists in a joke. In the midst of laughter an audience drops its guard. … A joke in a speech has the same dual function. (229)

Every speechwriter knows that editing is the greater part of writing, and anyone with a facility for language can write a long speech quickly. Writing the correct and appropriate short speech takes time. (237)

Wilberforce exhibits a primary skill of democratic politics – the patience to argue for a secondary item as aa preliminaty to the principlal aim. (239) [12 May 1798]

It is always important to end well. … There are two ways to finish. One is with elevation, the other is with pathos, but either way, the audience needs to be prepared, with the progress of the argument and the inflection of the voice, for the approaching conclusion. (244)

Pankhurst makes this case because she wants to be, rhetorically, the soul of reason to show that violent methods attach to valid ends. She is also a single-issue campaigner who has chosen a battle she might win – the franchise – rather than start a forlorn fight for everything, which yields nothing. (249) [24 March 1908]

It is always good to have a watchword, to embody the message in a single phrase. (262)

All speeches can be analysed by their use of time. Some speeches settle scores with the past. Some describe a current predicament and some project perfection into the future. (272)

Like all drama, a speech needs valleys and peaks. You cannot jump from summit to summit. An audience will be carried along with a passage of rhetorical grandeur if it seems to derive from an argument and bring it to a resolution. Like a joke requiring the set-up, or the recitative between the arias, the duller sections matter in the construction and, even though they may not dwell in the mind, the speech would suffer for their absence.  A brilliant speech is a whole entity and its more prosaic passages cannot be dismantled without doing violence to its finer parts. (272)

It is overwrought to reach straight for ‘wrong and wretched, squalid and brutal’ in the opening paragraphs. … This is like melodramatic characterisation in a poorly conceived opera. The drama starts in histrionic mood without any justification. The audience senses at once that this is Kinnock’s starting assumption rather than his reasoned conclusion. If you do not already share his starting assumption then the bald assertion is unlikely to be persuasive. (282-3) [15 May 1987]

Write in particular, not in general. (288)

… the crititique of your opponent is implicit in a clear description of your own view. You don’t help yourself when you serve up insults on a trowel. (289)

… speeches alone change nothing unless the background events are grand enough to warrant the rhetorical indignation. (300)

It is a basic rule that whenever a speaker starts to confuse politics with nature it is time to run for the hills. That speaker will always be trying to smuggle in something undesirable in which other human beings are regarded as not worthy of equal consideration. (323)

It’s not quite true that all good speeches both read well and sound well. (341)