Pitching science like a startup / Symptoms of autonomic nerves
Pitching science like a startup?
The verb pitch can mean throwing to the hitter in American baseball—with intense speed and accuracy—or it can mean making a quick bid to get a business deal or investment money—often also with intense speed and accuracy.
Neither sounds like it has much to do with science. Yet our first text this month set out to challenge scientists to become pitchers. Scientists tend to see their work as being slow, methodical, and complicated—and maybe even, as we discussed at our August workshop, brutally boring. But the text we read and discussed—the draft of a speech meant to inspire attendees at a biological and environmental symposium—offered a radical proposal: scientists should learn how to pitch their research the same way that entrepreneurs pitch their startup companies.
In our discussion we acknowledged that scientists might resist this proposal, and we debated how much the speech should first compliment the audience on their existing, more methodical (more boring?) skills. Either way, the goal was not to demand that scientists join a cutthroat startup culture, but rather to enhance the toolkit of scientists by suggesting that in some situations, the greater good of science can be advanced when a scientist learns how to make it super easy and super quick for a non-scientist to grasp the essense of their research. No simple task, though—much of our discussion was spent fine-tuning the practical tips offered in the draft speech, including knowing one's target audience, telling good stories, and failing early and quickly in low-stakes situations in order to understand what works and what doesn't in a pitch.
Next step: sign up for a baseball team?!
Symptoms of autonomic nerves
Have you ever suffered from red eyes, watery eyes, a droopy or swollen eyelid, the pupil of one eye bigger than the other, blurry vision, a runny nose or a blocked nose, facial flushing or sweating, or the feeling that your ears are blocked? A doctor might tell you, "It's probably just stress". But it's gradually coming to be understood that such symptoms could all be related to migraines, through what's known as the "trigeminal autonomic" system.
This was the subject of our second text this month, the draft of a commissioned article aimed at an everyday audience. To reach this audience the author was experimenting with a conversational mix of first-person anecdotes and easy-to-digest scientific explanation. We admired how this approach allowed the author, herself a migraine sufferer, to alternate between conversational phrases like "there were times I looked like a freak" and technical phrases like "hyper-activation of the parasympathetic nerves", so that the article managed to remain both friendly and informative. After decades of medical and scientific neglect, migraine sufferers are finally gaining more research attention and new insights.
We did discuss, however, whether in an article of this kind, it's possible to be too conversational. Some readers felt that too casual of a style and too many chatty remarks sprinkled in the text might undermine authorial authority—a tricky balancing act for any writer.
Image: Baseball Action ID