Talk Nerdy to Me - Erika Funke

In Melissa Marshall’s TED talk “Talk Nerdy to Me” Marshall addresses the need for the scientific community to be able to communicate more easily with the non-scientific community in order to bring about a greater understanding and positive outcome. She addresses her argument using comparative techniques, literary allusions, and other strategies to get her point across.

Marshall first begins her TED talk by using a personal story to help the audience relate to her appeals. She is representing the non-scientist community, so she compares her situation as a communications teacher being asked to teach a class of engineering students at Penn State to the fable “Alice in Wonderland”. This comparative technique/literary allusion allows the audience to relate personally with her story and fully understand what she is trying to convey.

Marshall is trying to communicate to the scientific community that they need to have relevance in their explanations in order for everyone to have an understanding. She addresses Jargon as a barrier to understanding. Her examples of jargon are spatial and temporal… which I personally don’t understand how that is jargon. I mean spatial being space and temporal being time are used pretty commonly these days. But I guess she is just trying to get her point across which she clearly does.

Marshall also states that “making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down” and uses Albert Einstein’s quote “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” This really allows the audience from both spectrums to understand each others perspectives.

During her speech, Marshall states to the scientific community not to use bullet points because they “kill”. I guess that was a nice mixture of a witty/cheesy comment. I am glad she brought up her points about bullet points because quite frankly they are tremendously boring and difficult to understand. Her PowerPoint topic was actually quite helpful to me.

Overall I think that Melissa Marshall’s “Talk Nerdy to Me” was worthy of watching. It had its pros and cons but overall it was all right. It was informing, but it failed to address the point of view of the scientific community. I recommend everyone to watch the onions parody of the TED talks called ONION talks preferably “Ducks Go Quack, Chickens Say Cluck” which is spoofing on these TED talks. They are spot on and pretty funny.