I hope this ensures that everyone in the room has some context, and that even the experts appreciate the refresher. For the background, I try to start really wide with a couple sentences about how what I'm going to talk about is important to everyone, and then narrow it down. Then, I hop right into the acknowledgements, showing everyone who collaborated on the project right away, instead of as more of an afterthought toward the end of my talk. Audiences will read the title and my name on their own, so I try opening with a short anecdote of how I got started on the research project. You want your audience to be just as excited as you are about your latest findings, right?! So why would you use a format that could possibly make your results appear dry and boring? The kicker is that they probably learned (didn't learn) the same way we are! It's a vicious cycle. Unless you went out of your way to find that class on public speaking, how to use PowerPoint, or how to write for a specific audience, the only examples we have for what not to do (or what TO do) are from those who are already presenting or publishing in our field. In college, STEM students are rarely formally taught how to effectively communicate our research. Somewhere along the line though, I think scientists just started taking what they write, and throwing it into a PowerPoint presentation.

When you're reading, you want a structure that is easy to follow and 'skimmable' so you can quickly get the information you need. This format can be pretty dry, but at least it serves a purpose. You've probably seen it before.in scientific papers: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. Joshua Schimel from the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded calls this the 'IMRaD' format.

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