8 Easy Ways to Better Explain Science to Non-Scientists
Many of the complex actions and discussions of day to day life involve science. However, huge ideological differences cloud such proactive discussions, because most common people are not trained as scientists. When a scientific research is converted into a book, it no longer remains for your peers who are experts in science. In fact, research works published in open international spheres are also meant for a larger audience than just your professors and colleagues. Sometimes, it gets extremely difficult for a researcher to explain his/her work to their own friends and family. To publish your thesis as a book, you have to understand how to cater to the common audience, who find hard to understand the divisioning of chromosomes or the black holes. But to be successful as a scientific researcher, you need to be able to explain your work to the broader audience who do not understand scientific terms. People may not understand Pulmonary embolism as it is if you include the term in your thesis. If you are thinking of converting your thesis into a book, you need to simplify find ways and means to explain the research to common people who do not know science.
The first thing to remember is to make it simple.
- Get to the point- Scientists are trained to go into the minute details of things. While explaining a topic, they go into sub topic and start defining and explaining the branches of those sub topics individually. That is how scientists give presentations to students or in a seminar. While you publish your thesis as a book, avoid the urge to go into microscopic details of a particular concept or idea. For general public, you need to get to key point or the basic idea. For a concept, just define it with brevity and conciseness, as basic as you can be. For e.g. while defining Photosynthesis, you may not go into the details of how light energy is converted to chemical energy with transfer of electrons, throwing forward the chemical equation in front, rather, just keep it simple with defining it as the process using which plants make their food from sunlight and water.
- Give examples as many as you can- Many abstract concepts are learnt essentially with examples. Remember how we used to learn from books in school. Even though we define that Second Class levers are those which have the load between the effort and fulcrum, for a common learner, it is required to mention that a wheelbarrow, a nutcracker or a bottle opener are examples of a second class lever, so that the reader can relate the idea with daily life objects.
- Use analogies– Often concepts and ideas seem bizarre to audience if they are not compared to simpler ideas which we often see or can visualize. Scientific concepts can be better explained by bringing in associations with common actions or phenomena which we do ourselves. When the Transportation Research Board offered $1000 for the best ‘translation’ into English of a term used in transport engineering, namely ‘through-put maximization,’ the winning entry by Paul Hasse, a science writer, used an analogy; ‘Car-flow on a road is like pouring grains of rice through a funnel. Pour too slowly, the flow is even but it takes longer: pour too fast, the funnel is clogged. The optimum speed is that which moves most cars per hour.’
- Avoid using jargon or technical abbreviations– Though some of us may understand some abbreviations like AIDS or CCTV, most of us even do not completely know the full form of BCG and ECG; let alone understanding critical ones like BASIC or PDF. For a scientist, BASIC can make sense to be Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code or Probability Density Function for PDF, but for a layman, the latter is just a file format and BASIC is just as basic as it sounds. When you publish your thesis as a book, make sure your abbreviations are properly explained. That is, if there are technical short forms of elaborate terms, that you absolutely need to use throughout your book, make sure you either use footnotes to explain them or attach an appendix or glossary at the end explaining each of the abbreviations with full form.
- Use keywords- Make use of popular words that people already know sinking with your current proposal. Keywords allow your readers to quickly find them on the web and also hook them to your work i.e. grab their immediate attention. With keywords people with have an idea of the basics of your research, the field, the genre, the subject on which you are working and then they will go on to read further to find out the uniqueness of your research. Lastly, when people think back on your conversation, they will generally remember the basics of what you told them, specifically those keywords.
- Paint pictures with words- When explaining things, use similes like poets used to do for identification of things. Use concrete words to describe the objects accurate, colour, temperature, direction every property, so that the audience can actually visualize the concept. Darwin on Ficus repens said, ‘Ficus repens climbs up a wall just like ivy; and when the young rootlets are made to press lightly on slips of glass, they emit after about a week’s interval, as I observed several times, minute drops of clear fluid, not in the least milky like that exude from a wound. This fluid is slightly viscid, but cannot be drawn out into threads. It has the remarkable property of not soon drying; a drop, about the size of half a pin’s head, was slightly spread out on glass.’
- You can use pictures and diagrams- Many a times, it is hard for readers to get to a concept through theory, but they can easily do so by looking at an image or diagram. However, you need to understand that your thesis book is not an anthology of paintings and artworks. Limit yourself to usage of diagrams and pictures, wherever necessary but not so frequently. That will help readers to understand stronger ideas, but not tire them with application of visual senses too much.
- Use the social media- If you decide to publish your thesis as a book, the social media platform is very good to translate your scientific idea into a colloquial palatable format and get it to the audience to attract their attention. In short you can propagate your work through social media and reach out to multitude. If you can simplify your concepts and speak or share them on the social platform, it can do much to promote your book, so that people will be interested to read more about it.
We all love the work we do; scientists love their research; their finding is their brain child and so they proudly want to share their work with the world. In order to make non-scientists understand science, the above tips have proven helpful and useful for reaching a wider audience for most authors who have published their research in form of a book.
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