I've been ghostwriting the last couple of days. No, I'm not talking about the Holy Ghost, though we're just through the Pentecost. I'm talking about science and technology.
I often make slides for my boss, technical stuff that she uses in various settings. This time, however, it was kind of a special event. Today the Prime Minister, the Mayor, and the CEO of the company came to visit our research center. I've never seen any of these people in real life before, only on TV.
Three months ago, we made a fairly big oil discovery in the Arctic (we found oil worth some 50 billion dollars with current prices). The Prime Minister, the Mayor and the CEO came to hear about the role of research and advanced geophysics in this discovery. My boss had 13 minutes to tell the story (the time schedule was planned minute by minute).
My own contribution was, by all means, very modest. I was just involved in parts of the geophysical work. I made my four slides, as usual. But this time I did more than that, because I wanted to create a good story. So, I wrote down, in detail, a proposed wording (a monologue) to use when presenting each slide.
As I was doing this, I realized that, what the Hell, this is just like writing a short story or a novel. I need a good hook to start with, then build up the excitement before the grand finale (unfortunately they already new the happy ending). I also put in a teaser pointing to on-going and future work, like writing for a series. It was great fun to write, actually.
I did of course, tell my boss, that this is just my proposal, the way I would have presented it. Use it if you want to, pick pieces of it if you like.
(The picture above has nothing whatsoever to do with the oil discovery mentioned above. I picked it from my archive of past projects. It's a seismic image from the other side of the world, offshore South America, computed 7 years ago)
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ReplyDeleteSorry, I totally used a word wrong and it bugged me.
ReplyDeleteI love how writing weasels its way into our day jobs.
When I saw that picture, it looked like a H&E stain of a cross section of a skin biopsy. Weird, huh?
That's still really cool!
ReplyDeletei kinda want to see the story. :)
ReplyDeleteI was wondering what the hell that image was.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Id - after your telling, I kinda want to see the story too!
ReplyDeleteBut...13 minutes? What happens if some one coughs for 30 secs? Does that mean 30 secs before the end of the presentation the PM and entourage stand up and say, goodbye and thank you? :):)
Seriously, though, how exciting to actually met the leaders of your country in the flesh!
Judy, South Africa
Very cool! And people always love a great story, regardless of the topic.
ReplyDeleteP.S. That photo is interesting. I think I see a face in it. ;-)
Cool, and the listener often knows there'll be a happy ending; it's how you get them there that counts.
ReplyDeleteGets me thinking though--the ghost in the overhead.
Lydia: No problem. I haven't seen many H&E stains, but I trust you're right. I used to be quite familiar with medical terminology (at least anatomy and physiology) when I went to sports high school in my teens, but now I have forgotten a lot of it. And we didn't learn pathology.
ReplyDeleteAlex: Thanks, yes I think so too >:)
id: The story is very interesting, but it will be kept secret for quite some time. Sometime in the future it will probably be told in public (in a science publication)
Suze: It's an image of the subsurface, below the sea floor, somewhere in South America. I have computed lots of images like the one above. Most of them are displayed in gray scale. I picked one in color, because it looks nicer.
Judy: Sometime we will tell the story. I'll let you know. It was cool to shake hands with the PM, and he didn't cough. Nice guy >:)
Liz: I write articles and reports regularly in my job, and I enjoy to apply some story-teller tricks even when I write technical stuff. Since I started to write fiction and this blog, I have become more aware of how I write things. Cool that different people can see different things in the image. It's created with numerical mathematics on a huge computer
Sheila: Yes, that's true. And when dealing with science and technology we want to tell stories with happy ending. Otherwise it means our research has failed.
It's always satisfying to smuggle a little creative verbiage into technical writing. I didn't often have that opportunity in the legal field, but where there was an opening I slid through.
ReplyDeleteCool photo--even more so knowing what it is. ;)