{"id":379,"date":"2020-01-27T05:03:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T05:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/?p=379"},"modified":"2022-04-13T20:51:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T20:51:11","slug":"telling-your-science-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/telling-your-science-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Telling Your Science Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Euan Paterson, communications and media officer, Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was at a recent marine biology conference that a research colleague of mine had his science communications \u2018Eureka moment\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It came during a session when the presenter confessed she was not a good communicator – because she was \u2018a scientist\u2019. My colleague winces as he recalls the collective acceptance of this statement from others in the room that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWould she have stood up in front of a room full of academics and admitted she wasn\u2019t good at stats, or graphs?\u201d he told me. \u201cShe would have been judged for that, yet she felt fine about being a bad science communicator.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that point on, he committed to making communications part of his job, not a necessary evil required by a funder, or something to do when he had some spare time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came into science communications from a newspaper background, not a science one. I had been curious about what I deemed a lack of news flow between published science and the news stands. Over the past five years in my current role, the reasons for this have become clearer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly, the myth that scientists are, by nature, poor communicators is a serious problem and entirely unfounded. In my experience, scientists are passionate about their work and are delighted to share their knowledge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem comes down to language and information overload. Within academic circles \u2013 and most notably in published academic papers \u2013 researchers must use certain words and terms that have specific meanings. They speak a certain language \u2013 let\u2019s call it \u2018academese\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, when they tell me what they\u2019ve been doing at the weekend, they don\u2019t describe how they ascended an orogenic landform at a gradient of \u2018x\u2019 to the height of \u2018y\u2019. Neither do they speak to me in Chinese. Instead, they tell me they climbed a mountain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I then want to know how high or steep the mountain was, I can ask. I\u2019m already engaged by the interesting \u2018headline\u2019 of climbing a mountain. The detail can come next. If the opening line had been to explain the elements that make up the rock in the mountain, I could become easily confused and perhaps wonder how this story was relevant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avoiding academese or jargon and employing everyday language to explain their science to the general public is well within the capabilities of these clever people. It is just more of an effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I inform a scientist about a media request for an interview, the response can be one of dread. Rather than seeing the opportunity to share their research, the thought of a media interview is approached as a pseudo-viva, a forensic examination of their findings. This reaction often puts scientists into a largely defensive \u2018peer-review mode\u2019 that can sometimes infringe on the telling of the story. In reality, the public, via the journalist, does not expect a public flogging and just wants to learn something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n