Poster presentations — using information and images to put forward your message

R22–0999 — POPH10071

Supporting materials

• Slides/materials: Slides

Practicalities

• Group: 50 (with 5 online)
• Length: 2 x 45 minutes
• Room: Flexible teaching space
• Discipline: Health /science comms
• Level: U/G Year 1

Learning outcomes

After engaging with this support, you will be able to:

Plan

Introduction to science communication

Explain types of science communication (scholarly comms — journal articles, books; public science — documentaries, pop science lit, talks, talking heads, news contributions; public health — websites, pamphlets, posters, other promotions) and link to those the group might already be doing (certainly essays, perhaps blogging, presenting). Poster presentations being an extension of this.

RAFT

All have RAFT in common and thinking carefully about these elements determines how you present your message:

Role as author: what are you aiming to do? Inform? Explain? Contribute to wider understanding?

Audience: who are they? What are their expectations? What do they know already? What do (you think) they need to know?

Format: in some cases our topic and audience, along with our aims as an author, might determine the format we use. In this case we have been asked to use a poster presentation. What opportunities does this format give us? What are its limitations?

Topic: we’ll be looking at Strep A but we need to be clear — our topic isn’t our message, argument, thesis or position. What do we want/need to say about this topic?

These things are all in balance — we might want to provide lots of information but are limited by our format, or by the requirements of our audience. Or our role as the author might be to connect the complexity of our topic to the level of understanding of our audience (writing scientific outputs for scientific audiences seems simpler!)

Using information

Again, RAFT determines the most appropriate information to use — both in terms of content and of source — as well as the way that information is presented — in a poster presentation format we can use images (and our audience likely expect and want images included).

Sources of information

What and where

Scholarly; stats and graphs; images

Evaluating your information

Both the quality of the information and what it will mean for your reader (ie, think about sources they will know and trust — not just that you trust).