Top Tips For Explaining Life Science Breakthroughs To A General Audience

Scientific research is exceptionally complex, and deals with specialist concepts that are difficult for even scientists outside of a specific discipline to understand, let alone the public at large.

Despite this, explaining scientific breakthroughs and life science marketing is of vital importance, and ensuring the implications and limitations of a discovery are broken down for a general audience is important to avoid misinterpretation.

One need only look at Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science to find just a few examples of what happens when reporting and disclosing scientific news is left to people who do not have a clear understanding or ability to interpret the findings.

With that said, it is possible and highly beneficial to explain breakthroughs to people outside of science, and here are some top tips to help this happen.

Start With The Summery

From a journalistic, marketing and press standpoint, many research papers are written in the wrong order, in that they start with complex details that, when devoid of context, are not easily understood and are prone to misinterpetation.

A great model to use is the inverted pyramid, or the news pyramid, where the most important parts of a story are explained first to give context for the later parts that come at the end.

Essentially, this is putting the conclusion or the answer first and then building up to how the conclusion was reached later.

Clarify Any Jargon Or Abbreviations

One of the biggest issues in scientific writing is that a concept in science that uses a certain term often can be conflated by a more general definition of the term.

This is very far reaching and a prime source of misinterpretations.

For example, even the concept of a scientific theory is confused, as whilst most scientists understand that every piece of scientific knowledge is a theory justified with evidence, non-academic circles use the term as a synonym for “educated guess” or “idea”.

Rely On Imagery

A general audience is often unable to see the meaning of particular results, so it is up to a paper writer to provide examples, descriptive analogies and metaphors.

For example, people may not understand the implication of wind speed, but they would understand the difference between a barely perceptible breeze and a strong gust.