Sharing how we can communicate our science effectively, whether in posters, papers or on social media!
Share
SciCom – Focusing on Your Reader
Published 28 days ago • 3 min read
Write for Your Reader
Hi Reader, today we’re discussing a central lesson for all good science communicators.
Whether you write a newsletter, blog, or social media post, or run a website, don’t worry too much about finding more content to publish.
Instead, in today’s world, it is often more effective to focus on how you present your announcements.
Especially when inviting people to take part in opportunities, many communicators forget this and make a fundamental mistake:
How Most Communicate
I constantly see organizations and communicators frame their communications around themselves.
They organize a conference. They award a scholarship. They support a research program.
Two major organizations, with 25,000 and 33,000 followers respectively, clearly want to provide value to their audiences. Yet their posts receive fewer than 10 likes. That means less than 0.1% of their followers are engaging with the message. Unfortunately, this is quite common too see...
Of course, they want others to join. But often, all they end up doing is announcing something they are involved in.
To encourage others to take part, the framing must change. It has to be tailored to the reality of the reader’s life.
Understanding the Problem
Your reader is not sitting down with the time and patience to dig through your content and search for its value.
Their minds are simply not there to unravel things; they are there to spot and filter.
Most people’s schedules look like this, whether they need to or not. The key realization is that their minds look much the same: there is virtually no room for anything else. So, if you want to capture their attention, you need to be genuinely compelling.
That means the problem isn’t that they are on their phones or that they can scroll through content quickly.
The issue is that they will scroll past your content when they don’t see clear signals that it contains something valuable for them.
You must show readers what they will gain, because they are not there to search for reasons why they should attend.
This is why you have to digest the benefit for your reader.
An Example for You
Think about how you would typically announce a conference. It might sound something like this:
“Join our annual symposium on [topic] in [city].”
That sentence is entirely about what you organized. The reader has to do the work of figuring out whether it is worth their time.
Most people will not do that work
Not because they are lazy, but because nobody has the spare mental capacity to dig through everything they receive in a day.
Announcing an event or opportunity lets people know the topic, date, location, and perhaps some of the speakers. But what they need to know is how it will help them or what challenge it will solve for them.
Imagine leading with what participants will take away rather than with what you have put together:
“Looking for new contacts in cutting-edge super-resolution microscopy? Meet them at a two-day workshop in Singapore from October 20 to 22.”
People can immediately understand who the event is for, why it is valuable, and which of their problems it helps address.
It Matters Everywhere
Of course, the same counts when you talk about your resarch or share something from a partner company or organization.
You might feel that the data, event, name, or reputation of the institution speaks for itself.
It rarely does. You still need to explain, in plain terms, why it matters to your reader.
This example comes from the newsletter of a scientific organization. Unless you had already attended the conference, the banner on the left would be unlikely to persuade you to go, wouldn’t it? On the right, it is difficult to tell which headline belongs to which section of text or what the friendly faces are meant to communicate. The images also fail to work together cohesively, adding even more visual noise. As a result, the personal message the newsletter is trying to convey becomes almost completely obscured.
Yes, you want to highlight your effort, goodwill, and prestige. However, trust me: your readers will discover that you or your partner does excellent work once they engage.
In other words, I would always ask:
What is in this for the person reading, and can they justify spending their time and mental effort on it instead of on their other obligations?
Key Takeaway
Don’t just announce something. Tell your readers why it matters to them.
I believe that, in today’s world, you have to show the value upfront rather than bury it.
Be concrete, because guessing is exactly what readers do not want to do. You can create curiosity, but that gap must be clearly defined.
All in all, I want you to leave with one realization:
The reader has to come first. It is not a matter of politeness. It is a matter of how attention actually works.
How to Convert Your Audience Hi Reader, how do you get people to actually engage with your content? Imagine you have a poster or a newsletter and want people to read more. In a surprising number of cases, nothing happens. The reader is quietly left to work out what they are supposed to do with all of it – but today we’ll see how to change that. The Value of Calling to Action A CTA, or “Call To Action,” is a prompt for your audience to take a specific action or click a certain button. There...
Design for the Scanning Eye Hi Reader, we have often talked about what to say and how to express yourself. But today, let’s look at something that happens before your audience can read a single word. I want to share some fundamental design principles that help you convert strangers into engaged readers. Here is how I keep things visually clean and easy to scan: How People Encounter Your Content If you write a newsletter, your reader opens it somewhere between two other emails. If you have a...
First Step: Attention Hi Reader, we established that good communicators focus on their readers. However, there is a subtle trap waiting right behind that insight. Today, we will take the insight that announcements don’t convince one step further. Let me share how I make sure my messages stand out among all the competing content out there: Don't Focus on Information Many scientists miss out on a large fraction of views and clicks because of one key misunderstanding. If you didn’t know any of...
