Everyone likes to hear a good story. From an oral tradition like Beowulf through Hollywood of the 1940s, storytelling is a universal. There is no exception for the biochemsist. A good story makes a good seminar.

Scientific communication is story telling. To tell a good story, you have to have a good story. Here it is in the context of writing a paper, but below I'll expand it to the greater freedom of the seminar. (3:35)

Now, what do they mean by a story?

They mean the central theme of a paper, the progression from what was known through the work they are reporting to their current view of the world. It is the same arc in a seminar, but without the rigid paper constraints.

The first thing to remember is that while giving a seminar you are free from the very rigid confines of the primary research report, where the central tenet is to present the essential evidence as briefly as possible. In the seminar you are able trace the development of ideas and understandings from the genesis of an idea through the development (and you can even talk about those experimental results that led you to the wrong conclusion, something that never makes it into the paper) of your current understanding. That is the story of science.

If you were hoping that what I meant by "story" was the human intrique that goes on in a laboratory over the course of a couple of years, sorry, all those details rarely make it into a seminar. You will notice that the seminar speaker usually identifies some people by name and tells you specifically which data they collected and how that was an important contribution. The reason is that the people who give the seminars, the principle investigators, rarely do any of the bench work themselves. Also, the seminar is place for them to "advertise" their graduate students and post-doctoral research associates as they will soon be looking for new jobs one step up on the academic ladder. That's why their names and often pictures are at the end.

So, how do you tell a story? The short answer is that story telling, as idenified above, is much more fundamental, more universal than in biochemistry. Thus, I'd like to give lessons on story telling that are completely disconnected from biochemistry. Learn the techniques and you'll be able to give good seminars on any topic (or write a novel, your choice).

Here is a short film. Enjoy the film, I'll dissect the story telling elements below.

0:01 to 0:07There is the introduction to the topic of the story, the Devil's Pool, a small pool of relatively still water at the top of Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River between the borders of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

As soon as this topic is introduced with the spoken word, it is gone and the film is on to another topic. This is the form of a seminar, the title gives a clear view of the topic, but it takes a good bit of development of other ideas to logically bring you there.

0:08Introduce and explain the second element of the story, tattooing. The back story here develops how the filmmaker uses this art.

1:07 to 1:15This is the first premise, for the filmmaker, the tatoo represents "something I don't want to forget. Something I want to be reminded of every day for the rest of my life." Alright, hold that theme as the airplane and the black wipe returns us to the story of the Zambezi River.

1:20We are back to the topic of the movie, and this is the initial development of the quest, the resolution of which is the major theme of the film. In seminar terms, you may have finished assay development and you are turning to apply that experiment to an open biological problem.

3:10The quest fulfilled. What, I would imagine, is a moment the filmmaker would like to be reminded of the rest of his life.

3:25The word "so." You hear it here, you hear alot in seminars. What does it mean? Well, it is generically used as the connector between two disparate ideas. A word used in the developement of an idea in order to link two ideas together. When you read the apopstle Paul, his word is "therefore." "So" is essentially the linquistically-challenged therefore.

Here it connects the Victoria Falls adventure with the first minute exposition on what tattoo work means to the filmmaker.

3:44This is the conclusion that brings it all together. "How cool ... right of passage ... this incredible moment...

3:54"... biting on my leg say, 'Don't forget this moment.'" And cut back to the tatoo artist creating the remembrance of the tiger fish, the Zambezi River and a quest fulfilled with his son.

Ok, but that doesn't help much because I have to give a very technical seminar that, while intensely personal, isn't at all about me, my failures and triumphs. How do I use elements of story telling to draw an audience to my highly technical conclusions?

Another view, again from outside of biochemistry. Simon Peyton Jones is a computer science researcher in the area of programming languages (he uses the "PL" acronym many times before defining it) who works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Here is his advice on giving a technical talk.

Alright, having seen a few academic discussions about how to give a talk, let's look at one. Again, not from the biochemistry sphere, but something you might recognize. Steve Jobs was the master of the technical demonstration, the keynote speech. Below is the film of the iPhone introduction (January, 2007 for context). Pay particular attention to, particularly in the first ≈7 minutes, the use of the pause, how does he use being quiet? Also, follow the pattern repetition, both in words and images. How well does that guide the audience?