In our workshop at the European Molecular Biology Organisation meeting in Vienna earlier this month, we asked participants to list the attributes of good and bad science presentations, both to non-specialists and to specialist colleagues at scientific conferences. You can see the results on our Facebook page here. No doubt you will recognise some of the points, especially those pertaining to bad presentations. So how can you avoid falling into the “bad” category?

Take a look at the “good” list, and you will notice that it is dominated by references to the audience: “Engaging audience”, “Understandable/Accessible”, “Audience awareness”, “Adjusts to audience”.  You can distill this down to one word that embodies the key attribute of a great science presenter: empathy.

This doesn’t mean you should come over all  emotional and touchy-feely, simply that any good communicator knows their audience and tries to step into their shoes. Try to see the world from your audience’s perspective. What knowledge do they have of your topic? What sorts of things might interest them and so help you pique their curiosity? This will help you pitch your talk at the right level–even when addressing academic colleagues–and to grab and hold their attention.

This may all sound very obvious, but you would be surprised at how many speakers fail to undertake this elementary exercise before preparing their talk. Worse, some compound their sin by recycling PowerPoint slides from talks for different audiences–for example, using slides of results from a specialist conference for a public lecture. 3D graphs or microarray data seem to be particular favourites in that last category, sending polite audience members quietly to sleep and the less deferential ones heading pointedly for the exit.

Deciding what level of knowledge to assume involves treading a fine line between taking too much as given and patronising your listeners. A good rule of thumb is to try and work out when you last shared an education with them. This will depend very much on where you and your audience went to school: here in the UK, for example, students tend to narrow their range of studies at an earlier age than those in other countries.

If a marine ecologist, for example, were presenting to a group of biochemists here in the UK, assuming a first year undergraduate level of ecological knowledge would probably be about right. The same ecologist presenting to some engineers might have to wind back the clock to the last year or two of secondary/ high school (age 17-18). If he or she were giving a public lecture to a general adult audience at, say, a science festival, a good starting point might be assuming the scientific knowledge of someone in their mid-teens (say 14-15 years old).

It is easy to forget just how much specialist knowledge you have. Think back: how much did you know about your subject when you were 16? Probably not a great deal. But you weren’t stupid either, and neither is your audience. They don’t want you to talk down to them or over-simplify your science. They just need you to start at the right level.

Claire Ainsworth is a co-founder and director of SciConnect. She also works as a freelance science journalist.

“Dear Dr Copley,” the letter began. “We are in Year 4 at school and we are learning about seashores. We have questions for you.” The letter, from a class of 8-year-olds, came completely out of the blue and was painstakingly pencilled in a child’s best handwriting. The questions were straightforward enough, but one in particular made me smile:

“Why are there fish?”

That’s an excellent question. Why ARE there fish? To answer it, you need to think about what was around before fish, the advantages of a fishy body, and how natural selection works.  The question made me look at something familiar in a new and fresh way. In formulating an answer, I revisited long-neglected ideas gathering dust at the back of my mind, which prompted new insights in my own research, the patterns of life at deep-sea volcanic vents. And it helped to remind me why I love what I do–not that I ever forget, but it’s easy for the daily grind of paper and grant writing and research admin to get on top of you.

It’s experiences like this that fuel my conviction that public engagement and research productivity are synergistic, rather than antagonistic. But although most funding agencies and research institutions now recognise the value of public engagement in their strategic goals, it’s only natural for time-poor researchers to ask “why?” and “what’s in it for me?”

In the past, I’ve occasionally encountered a snobbish view that those who spend time on public engagement are somehow second-class researchers.  It may be true that those who are juggling several successfully-funded projects have less time, but it doesn’t follow that those spending time on public engagement are therefore poorer researchers.  I’d argue that good researchers are often great communicators, because they see their science most clearly.

The skills and experience involved in sharing your work with wider audiences are highly transferable in a research career.  When I’m writing the non-technical summary for a grant proposal, I draw more on my experience as a science journalist than as an academic author.  Justifying your work in a few hundred words for the busy non-specialists of a grant committee is not the same as writing a technical report.  It involves seeing and conveying the “big picture” effectively, which is also at the heart of sharing your work with wider audiences.  So if you can explain your project clearly to a child, a grant committee becomes less daunting.

Similarly, we’re all non-specialists when we step a short distance outside our own disciplines.  ”Non-specialist audiences” therefore include colleagues in other fields, and being able to talk and listen to them can lead to new collaborations and avenues for research.  ”Crowdsourcing” data collection or data analysis through public engagement has also allowed some researchers to tackle questions beyond the scope of traditional projects.  Here I’m thinking of climate-modelling and signal-processing screensavers, or projects that have worked with gardeners to record changes in the seasonal blooming of plants and the arrivals of migratory birds.

Sharing your work with wider audiences also taps into a much larger pool of experience and perspectives than your own.  I recently gave a talk about my research to a local group of retired people.  One of their questions about my work was metaphorical, asking “is this like…?”.  The answer was “no”, but pondering exactly why during the drive home gave me a new perspective on a research problem.  And that will be going in my next grant proposal.

I’ve not touched on the benefits to society that arise from sharing your work with wider audiences, which have been well-covered elsewhere.  It is promising, however, that those benefits are now identified as “research impact” in the Research Excellence Framework that governs central funding to UK universities.  And “public engagement” is a two-way street: our research can benefit from it, as well as society.  It would be pretty arrogant to assume that no-one outside your research group or field can offer any useful insights and perspectives on your research problems.  But if you never share your work with wider audiences, you’ll never find them.

As for the original question, “Why are there fish?”, I’m afraid I can’t tell you how I replied. It’s such a great question that I now occasionally set it as a tutorial essay for my undergraduates.