6 - Creating Relevance by Generating Interest

Summary

Emphasizing readers’ perspectives on the demonstrations that they are developing, Chapter 6 opens by asking readers to describe a time when a phenomenon in their topic area awed or puzzled or amused them. Using reminders of what a free-choice setting is, this chapter emphasizes the importance in such settings of generating an audience’s interest and excitement. As advertisers do, science communicators benefit from quickly accessing positive emotions. Fun, intrigue, and coherence are some ways to do that. The chapter recommends that readers go back to basics by focusing demonstrations on the classic phenomena that all theoretical perspectives agree on; this avoids current and complex debates. The Worked Example finds the basics in a highly technical article on sentence structure in Mayan languages, then uses the Star Wars character Yoda to show one way to illustrate these basics that might be interesting to and accessible for nonexperts.