Science Presentation Analysis

Purpose

The main assignment for this week is to make a vodcast (a video with narration) about the research that you’ve been conducting throughout the semester. For that assignment, your audience is made up of participants at a specific conference of your choosing. If any of you have actually been to an academic or research conference, then one thing becomes abundantly clear: Scientists often struggle with providing an engaging, dynamic, and approachable presentation. In other words, their speeches can get really boring really fast.

Science journalist and solar system specialist Emily Lakdawalla recently wrote, “Bad presentation often gets in the way of good science. It’s a shame, because science is awesome.”

In this blog post, Lakdawalla offers some advice to help scientists increase the effectiveness of their research through public presentations. She sums up her insights in three words: “Respect your audience.”

For this assignment, you need to perform 4 moderate tasks:

  1. Read Lakdawalla’s blog post.
  2. Skim this article by Dr. Fatima AlZahra’a Alatraktchi
  3. Watch this TED Talk about the article in #2
  4. Use Lakdawalla’s advice to analyze Alatraktchi’s translation from a journal article to a speech.

Audience

You’re writing this assignment for me so treat it as you would an essay for any other class.

Content, Organization, and Document Design Requirements

In your analysis, you should dedicate at least one paragraph to each of the 5 questions that Lakdawalla suggests scientific speakers should be asking themselves before they give a presentation.

See if you can answer these questions in regards to Alatraktchi’s speech. As an audience member, can you determine to whom she was speaking, what she wanted them to learn, what her story was, and how her visuals amplified her story? (Rather than address the question about time, ask instead how she boiled down a fairly long research article into the first half of the speech.) If you can infer the answers to these questions, describe exactly how she got those ideas across. If you can’t answer a question, identify where you think she gets the closest to providing an answer and explain why this information wasn’t clear enough for you.

Be specific! When you describe something you MUST connect it back to the transcript and cite it with a timestamp. If you say the speaker clearly articulated her purpose, quote the line that was stated and put the time when she did it in parentheses.

Further requirements of this assignment include:

  • Cover page with your name, class and a title for your paper
  • 2-3 pages of text – double-spaced (approximately 500-750 words)
  • You are not required to formally cite the blog, the article, or the TED Talk, but make sure that it’s clear to me when you’re talking about Alatraktchi’s speech vs her article.
  • Papers with less than 500 words (excluding the cover page) will receive a 0!

Style Conventions

Use a concise but formal writing style. Please remember that formal writing does not mean using unnecessarily complicated language or big words. Formal writing is at its best when it’s simple, clear, and respectful.

Proofread carefully to avoid any typos, errors, or unnecessary language. Please do not forget to run spellcheck! As a rule of thumb, make a habit of running spellcheck at least twice for any document.

For this document, everything should be in paragraph form. Your analysis should be written as an essay not as short answer paragraphs for each question. This means that you must make sure that all sentences and paragraphs are organized in a logical way, using transition words and phrases as needed.