{"id":79,"date":"2022-02-19T15:13:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-19T15:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/welspgr\/?p=79"},"modified":"2021-09-22T13:15:47","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T12:15:47","slug":"talking-about-your-research-your-take-away-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/welspgr\/index.php\/2022\/02\/19\/talking-about-your-research-your-take-away-message\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking about your research – your take away message"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The delightful Mr Grebo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Talking about your research<\/u><\/p>\n

As a PG researcher, you will inevitably have to give presentations on your research. An opportunity came up in July for me to do just that with an international group of doctoral students as an audience. Hosted by Liverpool John Moores Centre for Educational Research<\/a>, I recommend you take a look.<\/p>\n

Although I had only just completed my 1st<\/sup> year and so had not yet carried out any research, I was still excited to share my many ideas and thoughts.<\/p>\n

This was the problem! How to condense a complex subject I really care about so that I can share something interesting with people who nothing about my topic or context. In about 15\/20 minutes, when I had enough trouble cutting my summative assessment on the subject down to 10,000 words.<\/p>\n

Scene setting<\/u><\/p>\n

I needed to introduce myself and provide enough about my context that the audience could appreciate the situation. This was the (relatively!) easy part; a bit about me and my background and then linking into the work I am researching with a few headline statistics showing its scope and scale.<\/p>\n

Narrowing the focus<\/u><\/p>\n

Then came the hard part; deciding what to focus on \u2013 what the simple \u201cmessage\u201d was that I wanted the audience to take away with them. \u00a0I decided at this early stage my message should be<\/p>\n

I am researching if we can use predictive analytics in Toastmasters.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We have all sat through presentations or speeches where the focus is unclear because the speaker wants to tell you everything or doesn\u2019t really have a clear idea what their message should be. My focus was so that if someone in the audience was asked, \u201cwhat was that talk about?\u201d they could respond with that one simple message.<\/p>\n

Content<\/u><\/p>\n

I decided that I would use a piece of work I had recently done as the basis for my presentation. My summative assessment began with a literature review and ended with my research questions.<\/p>\n

Constructing the narrative<\/u><\/p>\n

Clearly, a well-constructed, academic literature review is too complex to get across in a presentation, but this is not my intention. In my 15\/20 minute presentation I just want to get across my one simple message.<\/p>\n

I approached this by working backwards<\/strong>.<\/p>\n