Science Storytelling Workshop, Then and Now

An extended PDF of the workshop with notes and examples from the 2020 in-person event can be found here for all those who wish to revisit or work through the workshop on their own. 

Four years ago (in 2020), we, the leadership team at SciSays, were gearing up to host our much anticipated Spring event, Posters in the Park. Prior to the event, we held a workshop series to prepare participants to generate and present pared-down research posters to the Davis public, and the third workshop in this series was my Storytelling and Elevator Pitch workshop. As fate would have it, I had scheduled that workshop for March 12th, 2020, days before the “2-week” COVID shutdown was mandated in Yolo County. Although we had no idea what was to come, I held the workshop in person, but also heavily annotated my slides so the workshop could be done on someone’s own time in the safety of their own home. Those slides and the recap of that rendition of the workshop can be found here..

Fast forward four years, and we are once again excited to finally be gearing up for our big Spring event, now rebranded as Posters for the Public. We are hosting monthly workshops to help participants prepare, and so I was able to repeat this workshop fully in person in February. Adapted from the wonderful work of Dr. Sara El Shafie’s Science Through Story workshops and her collaborations with Pixar, I asked participants to write out their elevator pitch and message box before setting those aside and brainstorming together what makes a universally good story. From there, I asked participants to draw their research and use that graphic, whatever form it took, to double-check the storyline of their original elevator pitch and trim it down to just 30 seconds before working through each pitch as a group. 

The subtle changes in how the participants approached the science storytelling pointers felt particularly special to me during my second pass of this workshop. Four years ago, much of the workshop was devoted to identifying and rephrasing jargon, understanding how to make the speaker a relatable main character, and distilling a project to its key, audience-friendly goal. However, in 2024 the participants felt very comfortable managing these perhaps scicomm-pitfalls-of-the-past and seemed comfortable converting their work into drawings. (Stay tuned for SciSays leadership’s musings on how the needs of SciComm have morphed in the days since COVID.) 

The more common problems at last month’s workshop were less about how to tell a good story and more about choosing the best story to tell. Together we worked as a group through several participants’ research projects to determine the best story for the task at hand. For the upcoming Grad Slam competition, was it better to choose the project that is more instantly familiar and understandable to the audience, or the more complicated project with the more exciting, thought-provoking, and climate-forward impact? We ultimately agreed on the latter because we felt scientists have gotten better at tailoring our language for our audiences, and our audiences have grown more accustomed to not getting lost in the jargon and enjoying the challenge and excitement of a new, impactful project. We came to similar conclusions for other participants who were there working on their posters for Posters for the Public. Here, the overwhelming feedback was to choose the project the presenter was most passionate about, even if the concepts were more complex because their excitement while discussing the poster would compensate for any vague or convoluted points. Another participant was preparing for a talk to her peers and used the drawing portion of the workshop to decide on the best beginning to use to captivate her audience. She ultimately restructured her elevator pitch to be clearer at the beginning by converting her final concluding sentence into her opening hook, letting the audience know the take-home message right away.

I look forward to seeing how people start graphically displaying these projects at our next workshop, focusing on building better, or Butter, Posters, on April 4th, 4:30 PM in the Big Hanna Room.

Mary Madera is a Plant Biology PhD student. For more content from the UC Davis science communication group "Science Says", follow us on Twitter @SciSays.