Book contents
- How to Talk Language Science with Everybody
- How to Talk Language Science with Everybody
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Why Bother?
- 2 You Can Be the Expert
- 3 Cooperative Conversations
- 4 Conversational Goals
- 5 Know Your Audience
- 6 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest
- 7 Creating Relevance by Making Connections
- 8 Quality and Credibility
- 9 Quality vs Quantity
- 10 Learn to Listen
- 11 Information Structure
- 12 The Curse of Knowledge
- 13 Start with Examples
- 14 What’s New?
- 15 From Given to New
- 16 The Three-Legged Stool Approach
- 17 Working with a Range of Different Audiences
- 18 Where Can I Go?
- 19 Being a Good Partner
- 20 Finale
- Appendix Teaching with This Book
- References
- Index
6 - Creating Relevance by Generating Interest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2023
- How to Talk Language Science with Everybody
- How to Talk Language Science with Everybody
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Why Bother?
- 2 You Can Be the Expert
- 3 Cooperative Conversations
- 4 Conversational Goals
- 5 Know Your Audience
- 6 Creating Relevance by Generating Interest
- 7 Creating Relevance by Making Connections
- 8 Quality and Credibility
- 9 Quality vs Quantity
- 10 Learn to Listen
- 11 Information Structure
- 12 The Curse of Knowledge
- 13 Start with Examples
- 14 What’s New?
- 15 From Given to New
- 16 The Three-Legged Stool Approach
- 17 Working with a Range of Different Audiences
- 18 Where Can I Go?
- 19 Being a Good Partner
- 20 Finale
- Appendix Teaching with This Book
- References
- Index
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.
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- How to Talk Language Science with Everybody , pp. 66 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023