Alexis Brierley Ted Talk

In her talk entitled “Talk Nerdy to Me,” Melissa Marshall discusses the danger of the communication gap between scientists and everyday people and also ways to resolve it. She begins with describing why science is so important. Moreover, Marshall highlights that it is crucial for scientists to be able to share this information or it renders itself useless in people’s everyday lives. Before viewing this TedTalk, audiences could make the assumption that science people will understand science and that it does not affect the lives of ‘non-science’ people. The problem is that scientists just expect others to understand what they are saying, but audiences without this technical knowledge have no hope of following along. Marshall, however, emphasizes that this is no excuse for miscommunication. She uses the example of Alice in Wonderland to accentuate this point. By using her own personal experience as a communication teacher to engineers, she positions herself into the situation, making it more personal and giving credibility to her speech. She described what it was like to teach such smart people as an outsider, comparing it to Alice in her Wonderland. Because of this experience, she has the authority to advice others in bridging the gap between people like herself and people like her engineer students. As such, she describes strategies that scientists can use to help others understand their research. One tactic describes was to make scientists’ individual fields applicable and personal to everyday life, making others invested in what they are researching. Additionally, she advises for scientists to take out unnecessary technical talk. It is, however, important to point out Marshall’s own audience: the scientists who need to take her advice. Because of this, she was quick to point out that they do not need to dumb down their work, just make it understandable. As such, she mad parallels by quoting Einstein and using specific examples of scientific research. By using both scientific and familiar imagery, humor, and the household fairytale of Alice in Wonderland to help her scientific audience see how dangerous a gap in communication can be in their fields, Marshall successfully bridges the breach between science and non-science worlds.