Less Stuff, More Story: Tips for Academics Addressing a General Audience

 

Fires made of bones. Extinct plants germinated from seeds thousands of years old. Exciting stuff, or so you’d think.

As we walked back out into the snowy night from the National Archaeology Day talk at the Beringia Centre by Norm Easton[1], the people I talked with agreed that the content of the talk had been interesting, but the talk itself was boring.

I had been excited to attend, because I had recently read an article by Dr. Easton[2] and had enjoyed his writing. Listening to his talk inspired me to reflect on obstacles for academics writing for – or speaking to – a general audience.

Since academic writing occupies an elite hierarchical position, I think academics underestimate the challenge of writing for a general audience. They don’t realize it’s a different rather than a lesser skill.

You would think a highly trained, exceptionally fit dancer would be able to walk. But most dancers I know can’t walk very far. Their specialization makes some more common skills inaccessible to them. I have never been able to do the splits, myself. But my partner Dean brought his GPS to Rome and even on a restful day we covered more than twenty kilometers. I wonder if an academic is something like a dancer.

Dr. Easton’s talk contained too much information and not enough story. It was a tour of twelve or so sites with little connection between them. It amounted to a list. “I sat down and read the phone book. It was gripping and I learned a lot about my community…” said no reader ever, or at least very few. Even The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a famous book of lists, intersperses poetic lists like “Things that make the heart beat faster” with stories.

People like stories. People also like The Nutcracker, for reasons I can’t fathom. The framing story is silly and gets little time. Most of the show consists of a sequence of unrelated dances by mushrooms or sugar plum fairies that in no way advance the plot. In structure, Dr. Easton’s talk resembled The Nutcracker but without live strings.

My friend Brett Dillingham (www.brettdillingham.com) is a storyteller who teaches children and others around the world how to make and tell stories. He would tell us that a story has four parts – beginning, problem, solution, and end.

If Dr. Easton had told us about fewer of these sites, but as stories, his talk would have been gripping. In the beginning of each story, he could give us the context for each item of research. Ideally we’d also meet some kind of main character, possibly the researcher, with whom we’d have some sympathy. The research question becomes the problem, and the adventure of seeking answers becomes the meat of the story.

Like the first sentence of this blog post, a talk without a story is like a list, like a sentence without a verb. It fails to move.

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[1] From the Yenisei to the MacKenzie – A tour of archaeology sites of greater Beringia at the end of the Pleistocene

[2] Easton, N. A. (1990) “Lower than the Angels” – The Weight of Jim Logan’s Art. Canadian Journal of Native Studies. Vol. 10, No. 1: 134-141.