Story99.com is a Branding & Storytelling Consultancy for B2B, Tech & Deeptech

Good research explained badly still fails to land. Treat this playbook more like a working reference than a rigid guideline. You will have to pull the right pieces that you need before your specific talk, poster session, interview, or grant pitch.

The more deeply you understand something, the harder it becomes to remember what it’s like not to understand it.

There is a term for it - curse of knowledge.

It’s why experts default to chronological explanations (“first we did X, then Y, then Z”), over-qualify every claim, and forget to explain the one term that unlocks everything else.

A quick self-diagnostic — see if you recognize yourself in these:

• The Time Traveler — you narrate the research in the order you did it, not the order the audience needs to hear it.

• The Encyclopedia — you build ten minutes of background before revealing why any of it matters.

• The Jargon Fortress — you use field-specific terms without noticing they’re field-specific. 🙂

• The Hedge Maze — every sentence has three caveats, so the main point never lands clearly.

Most of this playbook is about undoing one of these four habits. Let’s roll.

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Part 1 - Before You Write a Word

1. Know your audience, specifically

“General audience” isn’t specific enough to write for. Before you draft anything, answer: What do they already know? What do they care about? Why are they in the room (curiosity, funding decision, personal stake, obligation)?

A talk for donors, a talk for policymakers, and a talk for undergrads share a topic but should barely share a script.

2. Choose the core feeling you’re going for

Separately from the content, decide the emotional register: wonder, urgency, hope, curiosity, trust. Then do a pass over your outline and ask of each section - does this build the feeling, or dilute it?

A talk about a slow-moving public health risk probably shouldn’t open with a joke; a talk about a delightful discovery probably shouldn’t open with a wall of caveats.

Part 2 - Structure the Story

3. Don’t bury the lead

Say the headline result in the first 30–60 seconds, in plain language, before any methodology.

Journalists call this the inverted pyramid: most important thing first, supporting detail after. If someone had to leave right after your first sentence, they should still walk away with the finding.

Instead of: “To understand the role of enzymatic degradation in polymer waste, we screened over 10,000 microbial isolates…”

Try: “We found an enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles in under a day instead of 400 years. Here’s how.”

Doing this also acts as an “empowerment promise”: you are telling the audience exactly what they will know by the end of your presentation that they didn’t know at the beginning (how exactly the research was done, why does it even matter and what next).

4. Know your end

One possible end could be - on the back of this research, our next set of research would be around…

Anyway, since you have already revealed the key finding in the first sentence - you need to think where to end your talk / presentation / explainer. Be creative.

5. Earn the “why should I care” early, but then let it go

Spend one or two sentences, early, on stakes: what problem this touches, who it affects, why now. This is not the whole talk - it’s a hook, not the destination. Once the audience has a reason to lean in, move on to the actual substance.

6. Use the And–But–Therefore engine

This was popularized by scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, this is a simple narrative rhythm that keeps momentum instead of a flat list of facts

• AND - build the setup (what’s known, what we tried)

• BUT - introduce the tension (what didn’t work, what was surprising, what was missing)

• THEREFORE - deliver the resolution (what you did next, what you found)

The “therefore” of one loop becomes the “and” of the next. And this ends up creating a sense of momentum instead of “and then… and then… and then.”

We looked for natural enzymes that break down plastic (and), but the ones we found in the wild were far too slow to be useful (but), so we used lab evolution to speed one up twelve-fold (therefore) - turning a 400-year process into an overnight one.

Part 3 - Curate Ruthlessly

8. Build and rank your idea list

Write down every genuinely interesting, novel, or important thing about the work - no filtering yet. Then rank it. And then based on the time that you have, picked some of the top points and let go off the low-ranking points.

This keeps you from cutting reflexively (usually cutting the newest or riskiest idea) and instead cutting deliberately.

A useful tip: your top 1–2 points should be able to stand alone as the entire talk if you were suddenly cut to two minutes. Everything else is in service of those.

9. One idea per moment

Each slide, paragraph, or beat should carry exactly one idea.

If you notice a slide doing double duty (“also, interestingly…”), it’s a sign that idea either needs its own moment or needs to go on the cutting-room list from step 8.

Part 4 - Making It Accessible Without Dumbing It Down

10. Use analogies

It makes easy for one to understand technical concepts. No analogy is perfect. Just find something that’s good enough.

11. Use numbers, specific names and few technical terms

They add credibility to your talk / presentation. If you get rid of everything, the whole research sounds very fluffy. You can pick few numbers and limit the number of technical terms but don’t erase them entirely.

12. Use numbers but given context

Raw statistics and scientific notation build credibility but might not connect emotionally with your audience. But instead of saying “10\^7 cells”, you can probably say “roughly the population of a small country”. “A 12-fold increase” could be restated as “what used to take a year now takes a month.”

Also, round off more than feels comfortable. It’s OK. A level of detail that your audience can’t use is just friction.

13. Run a jargon audit

Go through your draft and flag every word a smart friend outside your field would stumble on. For each: cut it, replace it with a plain-language equivalent, or — if it’s essential and unavoidable - define it once, memorably (hopefully using an analogy), the moment it’s introduced.

Watch especially for words that sound like plain English but mean something specific in your field (“significant,” “theory,” “model,” “control”) - sometimes, these are more dangerous than obvious jargon because the audience thinks they understood you.

Part 5 - Delivery Mechanics

13. Signpost the journey (for longer talks)

For longer talks, briefly tell the audience the shape of what’s coming (“I’ll show you the problem, what we tried that didn’t work, and what finally did”) and remind them where you are as you move through it.

Do make sure that just laying down this map itself doesn’t take too much time. Else, it may sound repetitive when you actually start explaining the points.

14. Repeat the core message (three times if you can)

State your one sentence (from step 2) near the top, restate it in different words once you’ve built some evidence for it in the middle, and land on it again at the close, now tied to why it matters going forward.

15. Simplify visuals ruthlessly

If a slide needs a full sentence of explanation to be understood, it’s doing too much.

Strip chart axes, legends, and labels down to what’s necessary; consider labeling the takeaway directly on the chart (“This line means X”) instead of making the audience infer it.

Part 6 - Test Before You Go Live

16. The kitchen test

Explain the work out loud to someone outside your field - over coffee, on a walk, whatever’s low-stakes. Observe their expression. Ask them what they understood. Incorporate the feedback into rewriting your explainer. At some point, you will converge.

17. Rehearse out loud and cut to fit

Reading silently is not the same skill as speaking. Say the whole thing out loud, timed, at least once. You will almost always be over time. 😀

• Do: Cut using your ranked list from step 8, starting from the bottom.

• Don’t: trim every section a little - that reduces depth from everything and makes the overall talk / explainer too condense to follow

18. Prep for the “so what” in Q&A

Anticipate the questions a non-expert is most likely to ask: “So what does this mean for me?” “What happens next?” “Why should anyone care?”

Not a bad idea to have a short, plain-language answer ready for each, with the option to say “the short version is X - happy to go deeper if useful” so you’re not forced to pick between oversimplifying and losing the room.

Before / After: Putting It Together

Before (Time Traveler + Encyclopedia + Jargon Fortress):

“So our lab has been working on this for about three years. We started by screening a library of over 10,000 microbial isolates from landfill soil samples, looking for organisms capable of extracellular hydrolysis of PET.

After several rounds of directed evolution and structure-based mutagenesis on the candidate esterase, we improved the kcat/Km ratio roughly twelve-fold under mesophilic conditions…”

After (lead first, ABT, analogy, human-scale numbers):

“We’ve engineered an enzyme that reduces the time taken for plastic bottle to breakdown from 400 years (in a landfill) to under a day.

But how did we achieve this? We basically went looking for natural enzymes that could digest plastic, and found some. But there was a problem - they were far too slow to be useful. So we used lab evolution to speed one up twelve-fold, eventually turning a 400-year process into an overnight one.

Think of it like breeding a marathon runner into a sprinter, generation by generation, until it’s fast enough to actually matter.”

As you will note, the second version is easier to follow because it leads with the key finding, uses tension (ABT) instead of chronology and deploys an analogy (which makes it more visual).

Quick Pre-Talk Checklist

Before you draft

• [ ] I know exactly who’s in the room and what they care about

• [ ] I can state my one-sentence takeaway

• [ ] I’ve picked the feeling I want to leave them with

Structure

• [ ] The headline result appears in the first minute

• [ ] “Why it matters” is covered, but not the main content

• [ ] The talk moves in And–But–Therefore beats (not necessarily chronologically)

• [ ] Opening and closing connect back to each other

Content

• [ ] I have a ranked list of points and cut from the bottom

• [ ] Every slide/section carries exactly one idea

Accessibility

• [ ] I’ve run a jargon audit and defined what I couldn’t cut

• [ ] Analogies to explain technical concepts

• [ ] Numbers are translated into something picturable

Delivery

• [ ] ABT structure

• [ ] My core sentence appears three times, reworded

• [ ] Every visual passes the “no explanation needed” test

Testing

• [ ] I’ve explained it out loud to a non-expert and watched for confusion

• [ ] I’ve rehearsed out loud, timed it, and cut to fit

• [ ] I have plain-language answers ready for the “so what” questions

Delivery Techniques Tips & Suggestions

• Cycle on the subject: Repeat your key points roughly three times because about 20% of the audience will be zoned out at any given moment.

• Build a fence around your idea: Clearly distinguish your idea from similar ones (e.g., “my algorithm is linear, not exponential like Karthik’s”) so the audience isn’t confused.

• Provide verbal punctuation: Enumerate your points (e.g., “the first idea is…”, “the third idea is…”) to give lost listeners a landmark to “get back on the bus”.

• Ask carefully chosen questions: Wait up to seven seconds for an answer. Ensure the question isn’t too obvious (which causes embarrassment) or too hard (which causes dead silence).

• Express passion: Show genuine excitement about your topic; this is the most effective way to inspire an audience.

• Choosing & Using Tools: Physical items illustrate concepts tangibly and stick in the audience’s memory long after the talk.

• How to end a talk: Let them know the talk is over by telling a joke, offering a benediction, or delivering a salute about how much you valued your time with them.

Story99.com is a Branding & Storytelling Consultancy for B2B, Tech & Deeptech

Subscribe to https://learnstory99.substack.com/subscribe where we notify you when we update our existing frameworks and insights around storytelling, marketing and brand-building.