Most of my client work involves a presentation with a hard/difficult business or scientific issue to explain. All science is complex, and it requires someone to study for years to understand it. But in some scientific disciplines I can get away with things.
Take medicine for example. Here is what you can do to make things understandable to the layman:
- Micro focus on one very specific condition/disease, and omit all other 35,000 medical issues a student usually has to go through
- Simplify, eliminate complex / long / Latin names
- Abandon commonly used diagrams, and instead make your own, completely non-standard drawings that are solely aimed at explaining a phenomenon.
- Shrink all the statistical proof into a footnote. It is important for peer-reviewed research, it is not needed to understand the basic mechanism of a drug
This can work in other disciplines as well: economics for example. But it does not work everywhere. Mathematics for examples requires a broad understanding of concepts that are all stacked on top of each other, depend on each other. And there is no easy to simplify formulas.
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