Graduate Research Day: Communicating your Research: Clear Abstracts & Talks

When considering your abstract or short talk, you should include the following information:

• What is the background (big picture and more specific)?
• What is the potential impact or importance?
• What is the method/argument?
• What are the results or conclusions?

Use the worksheet linked below to organize your thoughts with a particular focus on considering how you might communicate the above to an audience of non-experts:

We have adapted 3 different abstracts from different articles. In each, we point out what the abstracts do well to make them more accessible to a reader, and then adapt each article to create a "less-good version" of an abstract, to demonstrate common but less-than-effective abstract writing that many first drafts include.

• This symposium is different from conference presentations in your field. Write for a general educated audience, not specialists. 
• Consider what technical terms you will need to explain and define. 
• Read or share your presentation with a friend not in your program, or a relative not in the field. Tell them that your goal is for them to understand you completely and that if there's something they don't understand, you need to go back and change it. Let them interrupt you, ask questions, or highlight every word they are confused by.

WIRED has a series where they ask experts to explain a complex idea and the research around it to five people of varying levels of expertise: a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.