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Week 11 - Pitch and Title Workshop with TLS

Submitted by dnavon on Wed, 04/05/2017 - 10:31

Hi everybody, I hope you enjoyed having Lian and Emma join our class this week as much as I did.  Hopefully you found their feedback useful.   For anyone who missed it, we took the pitches everyone wrote for homework last week and annotated them for jargon and assumptions.  Each pitch was read by several different people so that you all could get a few different perspectives on your work thus far.  We also went through an activity where people wrote down their potential blog title, then the next person had to improve on that blog title without losing any information, and the third person had to do the same for the second person's title, and so on.  It was basically the game telephone, but with titles!  Sometimes, information got lost or added in strange ways.  Sometimes what came through was not what was intended.  Picking the right title (engaging, informative, exciting, but not clickbaity) is really difficult!  We discussed how there are two main avenues or strategies for a good title.  One is to be really engaging and eyecatching, while the other is to be "search engine optimized".  At least with TLS, much of the traffic on the site comes in via Google search, so SEO is a good way to go for that particular blog.

In any event, you all will need to develop these pitches into a full-length post, which I will edit.  If you decide to revise them, you can submit the revised version as a guest post (or your next contributor post, for my current TLS authors) for TLS!  I am not making the submission to TLS a requirement, though.  Your full-length post is due to me, by email, in 2 weeks.

Next week, we will be chatting over Skype with Dr. Carrie McDonough, a founder of the URI-run blog Oceanbites.  To prepare for that class, please read the following papers: Irion 2014 (attached in my email) and Jarreau 2016.  You may also want to look at the Cal Newport reading that the Jarreau article was based on; however, that reading is entirely optional.  Make sure you come to class prepared to engage with a recent PhD who is very passionate about and effective at Sci Comm!

Finally, please fill out this short survey for our friends at TLS.  This will help them adjust their workshop for future audiences.  Thank you!
https://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/courses/spring2018/biol/oeb697k/content/week-11-pitch-and-title-workshop-tls
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