Episode 130 - Listen To This If… you’re struggling to find the story in your research

Transcript

Jen (00:00:11)

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Listen to This If from the team at Let's Talk SciComm. I'm Jen and as always I'm joined by the fabulous Michael Wheeler. And in these episodes we pick just one little thing to talk about. We try and stick to five minutes.

And today Michael, we are talking about what do you do if you're struggling to find the story in your research? Because people hear it from us, from all sorts of people all the time. You've got to tell a story. What if you can't actually find a story in your research? Well, what happens then? Help me, Michael.

Michael (00:00:46)

Well, it's... I mean, it's a good thing that you're looking for the story in your research. That's step number one.

Jen (00:00:55)

Golden star right there.

Michael (00:00:57)

So give yourself a big tick already for listening to this episode. And my advice really would be that a story is a problem-solution dynamic. And my tip is to really hone down on what is the problem that your research is addressing.

But to spend a lot of time reflecting on that and maybe trying out a couple of different problems because there's probably lots that can come to your mind. So something that might help you do this is if you try and finish this sentence, "This matters because..." And then maybe you have like five different versions of that sentence, right? And they're all different important reasons.

And maybe that reason is why it matters to you personally. Maybe that's your story, you know? Not all research stories, not all research is on humans, but all research is performed by humans, right? At least for now, the robots haven't taken over completely. So maybe it's about why it matters to you personally. So that would be my advice.

Jen (00:02:04)

Yeah, I think I completely agree Michael. And I'll have to think about a different angle to give my advice from because I think you're absolutely right. It's all about identifying the problem and the solution. And a good question to ask yourself can be "What has changed because of my work?" And if you can come up with an answer to that question, that can really help find the story.

But I agree with you. Let's go back to the basic elements of story. Problems, solution, characters, settings. Finding those. And I think really just kind of playing around with them and playing around with them could be having a conversation with a friend who asks you just a whole lot of leading questions. It could be having a whole lot of sticky notes where you write down a whole lot of different elements of your research and kind of move them around and look for themes and patterns.

If you're an AI user, and I know some people reject AI for very valid reasons. If you are an AI user, a chat with your AI platform about this could be really helpful. I think just sort of bouncing around ideas and talking about as you say, why do you do this research? Why does this research matter to you? What was the problem you were trying to solve? What's the solution that you found or you're on your way to finding? What has changed now because of the work? What's the breakthrough or the new understanding or the new insight? Why does it matter?

You know, there are so many questions you can ask yourself. And I think just that sort of iterative process of talking aloud or chatting with a friend or you know, having a conversation with an AI tool, all of those things can just help you really uncover what is it about this that's interesting, exciting, different, new, important that I can focus on when I want to tell a story about it.

Michael (00:03:45)

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting you know, when people start digging into this question of what is the story of my research? They pretty quickly realise there are so many different angles that I could take, so many different ways I could frame this. Which is part of the challenge. But it's also what makes it really exciting as well. Because you can be a little bit creative here and try things out as you say, see what sticks and what doesn't. So umm, yeah...

Jen (00:04:11)

And it all comes down to why are you trying to find the story, right? So what is the goal here and who are the people that you're going to be communicating with? Because as you've said, there are so many different aspects to the story of your research. You could probably tell 100 different stories about your research.

So what is it that you need to convince your audience of? What is it that you want them to feel or think or see differently? That's going to help you identify which story is the right one to tell. And of course depending on who they are, because different kinds of groups of people in terms of their demographics, their interests, their background in science, all of that stuff, that's going to have a big impact on which is the best story to tell.

But maybe Michael, our main takeaway should be trust us, there will be a story. There's always a story. It might just take a bit of chatting and brainstorming and thinking about which is the right story to tell. And you're probably going to tell lots of different stories about your research in different settings and to different people.

Michael (00:05:09)

Yeah, 100%. There always is a story and the fact that you're looking for one is a good sign and you will find it.

Jen (00:05:17)

Yeah, and have fun in the process. It's really fun. This is the creativity of science communication and we love it. And we're confident that if you don't already love it, you will soon too.

Michael (00:05:26)

Yeah. Good luck.

Michael (00:05:39)

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, we'd love you to tell a friend about the podcast or leave us a review. And you can reach out to us on social media.

And we're very excited to announce that we're launching a new newsletter called the ChitChat. Check out the link in the show notes or our posts on Instagram.

And also a big thank you to our production team, Steven Tang and Madeleine Kelly.