Whether you stay in academia or you leave, you will need to master the art of explaining your research in accessible ways. In academia, you will need it for students mostly, and also folks from far outside your discipline. Outside academia, you need this skill for… well, everyone!

But it’s hard. So, so hard. So hard in fact, that a number of disciplinary associations include an “Explain Your Research for Non-Academic Audiences” workshop at their national conference.

The truth of PhD training is, you know your research, but not really how to talk about it with anyone other than your advisor and a couple other grad students/PhDs who are in the same micro-niche.

This is not your fault. Academics spend years learning to speak to other super-specialists;  we learn the literature, we learn the terminology, we learn which distinctions matter in our field, which debates must be acknowledged, and which caveats have to be inserted before we can make even the smallest claim.

Then someone outside the university asks: “So, what do you research?” and suddenly we choke up, or, more commonly, we go deeply into the weeds. We start with the dissertation title and then we go on to explain the theoretical framework and the historical background. We introduce three terms that require definitions and then define those terms with four more terms. We foreground several critical subdisciplinary disputes, and then skip the conclusion entirely, not to mention anything resembling wider significance.

As you may imagine (and may well know from personal experience) this does not go well. Three minutes in and your hapless victim is glassy eyed and searching frantically for an exit.

That is why, this week, your task is to learn to tell your research story.

When you speak to a non-academic audience, your job is to make another human being understand a) what you are trying to figure out and b) why it matters.

This is NOT a version of your abstract. Why? Because your dissertation abstract, by its very nature, begins with a disciplinary problem. It might sound like:  ‘Existing scholarship on X has insufficiently accounted for Y.’ (This is actually a TERRIBLE opening even for a diss abstract, as I explain elsewhere, but we’ll set that aside for now). The problem for right now is, people outside your niche neither know nor care about ‘existing scholarship’ and what it has or has not failed to do.

What they do have a chance of caring about is something like: ‘I study what happens when…’ or ‘I’m trying to understand why…’

See the difference? The first version establishes your position in a scholarly conversation, which is necessary in academic writing, but the second instantly gives your listener a reason to care.

Your scholarly research problem and the problem that makes your research interesting to other people are related, but they are not always identical.

Ask yourself:

What is happening in the world that made this research worth doing? Sometimes you have to excavate your own past, when you first contemplated applying to graduate school!

Maybe something isn’t working, or a group of people has been overlooked. Is a technology changing faster than our institutions can respond? Does a historical story we tell ourselves leave something important out? Are people trying to solve a problem in ways that don’t work – but, and here’s the catch, they don’t realize it?

When I was starting out, I had just lived in Japan for two years, and was already 6 years into the study of Japanese language and society. And it was the 1980s.  Japan was everywhere. What I knew for a fact was that nobody in the United States had the slightest idea what was about to hit them, in terms of the Japanese economy, and Japanese society more broadly. We were awash in ignorance, and I felt like only I could save the day! Hubris? Of course! But what PhD gets done without hubris?

Remember where it started for YOU, and that might be where it can start for others. Mull it over. It might take many false starts and edits. But keep asking yourself, what would make people care?

At the same time, remember that this is the BIG picture mission you had at the start. One potential pitfall here is that academics often explain their work in the order in which they learned to do it, which means methodology. Don’t start with methodology. Methodology is profoundly boring for non-specialist audiences. It’s enough that you know why methods matter; your non-academic audience does not need a miniature graduate seminar.

Pause for an example. Imagine that your research investigates municipal responses to extreme heat. You could say ‘My research uses a mixed-methods comparative framework to examine municipal climate adaptation policies across three metropolitan regions’. That would be perfectly respectable, appropriate even, but only in academia! Outside, it’s a snooze-fest!

Instead, try this: ‘Cities are getting hotter, but the people most vulnerable to extreme heat often have the least access to cooling. So, I study how cities decide who gets protected—and who gets left out.’

Isn’t that great?  Isn’t it compelling? And it’s also true!  It’s not dumbed down (at least, in my opinion); it’s just re-cast for a broader thinking audience.

This is story-telling. We all do it. We all live in the midst of stories all the time. Ie, There’s a problem, there are people, there are stakes.  And sure, you might not know the “conclusion” yet, if you’re still mid-PhD, but you can indicate a couple possible conclusions. More importantly, you can clearly state the significance. “This matters because scientists say climate change might lead to extreme social unrest and violence, if we don’t solve problems like these quickly.”

So, this week, take your standard explanation of your research and interrogate every sentence.

Say, you study nineteenth-century British shipping records. Arcane. Definitely arcane. Why should anyone care?

Well, because those records reveal how global trade actually operated back then. Why should anyone care about that? Because the problems we have now started back then!

Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Or perhaps you study machine-learning models used in medical settings. Why should anyone care?Because these systems are making decisions about patients like you. Why should you care? Because your medical care is getting decided by algorithms! And it’s getting harder to get access to live human medical care. Not to mention that it’s working from models made by and for white men… just as an example.

There’s your story.

This exercise will probably feel uncomfortable because academics are trained to distrust statements that sound too broad, too simple, or – come on, let’s face it, too interesting.

Seriously. Sit with that last bit a moment. You HAVE been taught to distrust anything that seems too… easy? fun? accessible? It’s ok–PhDs can be intellectual snobs amongst ourselves, but looking outward, remember that INTERESTING IS GOOD. Precision matters, but obscurity is not precision. The ability to explain difficult ideas clearly is evidence of intellectual control. You know what matters, what can be omitted, what needs explanation, and what your audience needs in order to follow you.

Ie, you can simplify without becoming simplistic.

So this week, prepare three versions of your research story.

The 20-second version

Two or three sentences. No literature review. No methodology unless it is essential.

Answer the following:

What do you study? What are you trying to understand? Why does it matter?

The 60-second version

Now you have room for the problem, your approach, and one interesting finding or implication. Remember it’s a conversation, not a presentation.

The three-minute version

Here you can add complexity. Explain what surprised you,  tell us what you found, give an example, introduce nuance.

And again, at the risk of beating that dead horse,  resist the urge to dump the entire dissertation onto your listener. Test it out on non-academic friends and if you see the slightest indication of glazed eyes, that’s your sign. Stop and redo.

Also examine your scripts and circle every word that a normal educated person might not immediately understand. (BTW this can include PhDs from vastly different scholarly fields).

“Epistemological.”

“Neoliberal.”

“Ontological.”

“Endogeneity.”

“Intermediality.”

“Path dependency.”

“Biopolitics.”

The above is very humanities oriented, but STEM folks– I’m talking to you too! Work around your lab jargon!

Some technical vocabulary might be necessary but any complicated word you use has to be defined, and you have to count that against your clock! So be draconian! For every specialized term, ask:

Can I say this in ordinary language without losing the broadly important meaning?

Usually, you can. And by the way, if you cannot explain a concept without the jargon, that may be a sign that you don’t yet understand the concept as clearly as you think you do. This is one of the reasons that sometimes those Nobel prize winning scientists are so brilliant at Freshman intro classes (I encountered on in my daughter’s Berkeley Intro to Astronomy course). Because they know their field inside out and backward. So, they can explain in real words, with lots of humor.

Once written, you have to practice saying your descriptions out loud.  This is where the rubber hits the road. You’ll find that your beautifully polished paragraph sounds ridiculous when spoken. It’s still too academic!  It’s too writerly. It’s too jargony. You’re still too steeped in academia-speak.

Ie, sentences that are too long and filled with abstractions.

Record yourself on your phone and listen to it. It might be unpleasant but go ahead and try. Catch what you can and fix. Then explain your research to someone outside your field. Then explain it to someone outside academia. Watch their face. Ask yourself:

• Where do they light up?
• Where do they look confused?
• Where do their eyes glaze over?
• What do they ask about?

This is data.

If everyone asks about the same part of your explanation, pay attention. That may be the part of your research story that is most compelling.

If you keep getting a particularly “clueless” response, that’s a sign your explanation isn’t good enough. If one person doesn’t get it, could be a them problem. But if say, four people don’t get it, it’s a you problem.

So, by the end of this week:

1. Write a 20-second, 60-second, and three-minute version of your research story.
2. Remove unnecessary disciplinary jargon.
3. Make sure each version answers some form of “Why does this matter?”
4. Record yourself saying all three versions.
5. Tell the 60-second version to at least two people outside your field.
6. Ask them: “What do you think my research is about?”
7. Do not explain or correct them immediately. Listen.
8. Revise your story based on what they actually understood.

And please don’t feel this is wasted time. This skill is going to help you in academic job interviews, in grant applications, when talking to administrators, journalists, policymakers, donors, collaborators, and students. IN academia! And sure, potential employers outside academia.  Frankly, it often improves your academic writing too.

Remember: communication is not measured by what you intended to say, it is measured by what another person understood. You have spent years learning how to do the research and now you have to learn how to make people want to hear about it.