Audience-Driven Storytelling

When you write an abstract for a project, retweak it every time you tell someone about it. That way the story gets retooled at the speed of thought, matching your community and all the information you take in from them. Every time you retell the story for someone just on the edge of your social circle, you entertain another body of knowledge.  How would this story sound to scientists? to working-class folk?  Try to hear their thoughts in advance and tell them a story they'd find meaningful.  Then see how they actually respond, and take on what they know.

This advice particularly applies to graduate students at the end stage of a dissertation.  Retooling your methods won't work, but once you have your data, it can speak to many questions. Most book manuscripts that come out of dissertations suffer by responding to too shallow a literature, too narrow a public.  When you sit down to write the introduction and conclusion to a project, remember the best books you've read, the smartest people you've talked to, the most compelling conversations about changing the world.