[Coral-List] Some thoughts on how to tell the bleaching story

Steven Miller smiller52 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 08:26:45 EST 2015


Hi Peter

Have you read Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical 
Thinking? It's Randy's second book and it provides a framework for how 
to communicate that was missing in his first book.

If you want to tell the coral reef story, then you need to change HOW 
you communicate, not WHAT you communicate.

In science, we tell our stories with way too many ANDS.

And then I did this, and then I did that, and here's Figure 1, and 
Figure 2, and Figure 3, and Tables 1-10, and this is why they are 
important, and we ran these tests, and we need more funding.

BORING.

We need to get out of our "heads" to connect with the guts and hearts of 
the public.  One way to do this is to change HOW we tell our stories.

Coral reefs are in trouble, AND there's no doubt that it's getting 
worse, BUT not all is loss because amazing places still exist, THEREFORE 
read Randy's books to learn how to communicate more effectively before 
it's too late.

And, But, Therefore.

It's that simple.  And that hard at the same time.  There's even an App 
to help.

And frankly, Randy doesn't need to discover anything.  Coral reef 
colleagues need to discover Randy Olson.

Best regards

Steven Miller
Nova Southeastern University
Oceanographic Center

On 1/6/2015 4:29 PM, Peter Sale wrote:
> Hi all,
> For want of a better way to welcome the new year, I spent some time
> thinking about how we can tell the story of coral bleaching more
> effectively than we have been.  I fear our message is becoming "old news"
> and is not resonating with enough people.  My thoughts on this are at
> http://www.petersalebooks.com/?p=1823
>
> I encourage others to work on building better stories too.  Its time for
> Randy Olson to discover that his 'coral reef colleagues' are capable of
> telling an important story effectively.
>
> Best to all for 2015.
> Peter Sale
>
> sale at uwindsor.ca                 @PeterSale3
> www.uwindsor.ca/sale           www.petersalebooks.com
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-- 

http://www.nova.edu/ocean/overview/faculty-staff-profiles/steven_miller.html
http://www.nova.edu/ocean/research/labs/miller.html
http://www.marinefrontiers-llc.com



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