Welcome to Lesson #5 of the SciComm Society “Making An Impact” email course!
How did it feel to share your SciComm post with a friend or family member? Did you get some helpful feedback? Was it easy to implement their suggestions, or did you struggle with it? Let us know by hitting reply to this email.
In this lesson, we will look at another way of reaching more people with your research and helping your audience learn about it. This week will be all about translating your social media post into an engaging illustration.
The idea of creating something visual to represent your SciComm may make you recoil. But don’t worry; you won’t have to actually draw anything. That is unless you want to!
Here, we want to encourage you to think of engaging ways to visualize your research topic. You can go back to your list of key post ideas from week 1 and think about which of these topics you can explain visually.
Now, similar to a graphical abstract for your research paper, help your audience better understand your research with an illustration. Show processes, key players, and main functions of your topic or concept and how they all interact with each other. Use vivid colors to bring the illustration to life, but remember that simplicity is key. So, only show essential players and processes to not overwhelm your audience.
To illustrate your research topic, you can create a graphic, illustration, or infographic. Choose what makes the most sense and feels most comfortable to you.
Use one of these ideas to “show” your science:
Create your social media post
This week’s task is for you to select one of the options above, create an illustration, and post it on social media. Explain the graphic in the post to help your audience understand and learn. Use the hashtag #mySCSimpact so we can see what you came up with!
If you want to share it directly with us, hit reply and send us the link to your post.