Revising and editing is just as much work as researching and writing! While your education to this point may have emphasized creating (a research topic, a body of research), this stage in your educationIt’s hard to continually revisit a research project/paper/presentation especially when you’ve been working on it for so long. Once you reach the stages of preparing your research for a third party (whether it’s an audience of strangers or your class), the emphasis of your research shifts from gathering to organizing information. Organizing info includes the layout of text and images on your poster; refining your conclusions down to a few key ideas to emphasize to your audience; choosing the MOST essential images or graphics to include on your poster.
With that said, here are some of the main points of feedback given to the class on Wednesday, Nov. 22:
- Incorporate your conclusion into the title. In class, Prof. Cherrier suggested to incorporate your conclusion into your title to create a specific title for your poster; an additional benefit of doing this serves as a kind of conceptual exercise that helps refine the direction and thrust of your research.
- Use the new title as a springboard for revisions and prep for your presentation. For example, if your poster’s title reads “Green Stormwater Management Solutions in Brooklyn,” what would you say to someone who read your poster title and asked, “Why does New York need green solutions for stormwater management in Brooklyn?” Once you’ve created a poster title incorporating the solution into the title, then you can start refining the information on the poster as well as the information presented to the audience. If your title is “Implementing Green Infrastructure to Address Flooding and Storm Threats in Newtown Creek Sewershed Lower Manhattan,” then create some “what/how/why” questions from the title to help keep you on topic as you revise your poster.
- Create a “pitch” to introduce your project to an audience. Even if different people worked on different sections, everyone in the group should be able to briefly explain the project’s main points to a general audience. Develop a few sentences summarizing your project’s main parts in a few sentences: problem(s), process, findings, relevance, conclusion. Keep your pitch short and conversational (yet professional) by limiting yourself to 1-2 sentences per section.
- Talk through your research in order to refine your ideas and information. If you’re totally stuck (and even if you’re not), I strongly suggest asking a friend or family member to listen to your explain your poster for 8-10 minutes then solicit feedback with the listener’s questions guiding your explanation. The benefits of this exercise include receiving extra practice verbally communicating your research and a fresh set of eyes and ears often catch which elements of your poster, or parts of your pitch, might benefit from more or less information.
- Your poster (probably) has too much text. That’s valuable poster real estate! Most posters and PowerPoint presentations have too much text! Generally, including too much text stems from a desire to include ALL the info from your research and nervousness about forgetting info. A lot of info on the poster will be communicated verbally to the audience and you will probably add additional details to your audience. You can identify the areas where you can remove text by looking at the sub-bullet points. Example: the “Problem” section on the poster has three bullet points and each bullet point has 2 sub-bullet points.
- Orient your audience by including a map of the area on your poster. To all groups, Prof. Cherrier asked for a map that showed the location of the neighborhood in relation to the rest of New York City. She suggested using a Google Earth image to orient the audience to the location of the neighborhood (Coney Island, Red Hook, Newtown, etc.) as well as the location of the sewersheds within each neighborhood. Using a map helps ground the audience in specific, familiar information (what and where) as they learn new information from your presentation and your poster.
- Keep formatting consistent. Section titles should all have the same formatting; don’t randomly bold or italicize words; text should be left-aligned or left-right justified, etc.
- “So what?” is a question. Include the question mark in the section’s title!
