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Have you ever wondered how to use Twitter to talk about your research, or how to make your presentation pop? Did you know that we have an advisor who specializes in teaching University of ��ݮ��Ƶ students to do exactly this kind of thing?  The Writing and Communication Centre's Multimodal and Public Scholarship Program Developer, Elise Vist (they/them) is a specialist in all things related to multimodal and public scholarship. In this Q&A session we learn more about Elise's expertise and how they can support you in becoming a confident, engaging, and all around impressive communicator -- both in-person and online. 

Tell us a bit about yourself.   

My name is Elise Vist and I’m the Multimodal and Public Scholarship Program Developer here at the WCC. I’m really happy to be in a role that lets me support students in a variety of ways, whether that’s helping students be more confident presenters in Speak Like a Scholar, or teaching people how to make more interesting slides and posters to support their research, or even helping students dip their toes in public scholarship online. Because my education has been in English departments that focus on digital communication, I spent a lot of my time in undergrad and grad school studying social media, games, podcasts, and zines… so I’m really interested in the non-traditional ways we can communicate our research (and our passion!) to a wider audience.    

How long have you been with the Writing and Communication Centre and what is the most useful communication tip you’ve learned in your time here?  

I’ve been at the WCC for just over 2 years as a full-time staff member, but I worked here as a graduate student for a few years part-time! I think the most useful thing I’ve learned has been that writing (or any kind of communication) really is a process – not a ‘one and done’ where you write the perfect version of your paper and then never look at it again. Not only is that kind of thinking a recipe for disastrous procrastination, but it also just…isn’t how people actually write! Giving myself the room to write a ‘good enough’ version of something that I can always fix later has made it a lot easier to get words on a page.   

You’re the WCC’s Multimodal and Public Scholarship Program Developer. That’s quite the mouthful of a title. How would you explain your expertise and how working with you benefits students to someone who is new to academia?  

It’s such a mouthful of a title that I still have it on a sticky note on my desk so that I remember…but it’s a really accurate title! Generally, I’m a program developer, which means that I work with other experts at the WCC and across campus to develop resources that support both multimodal communication and public scholarship. Those two topics are different, but they have a lot of commonalities, which is why they’re both part of one job!  

The “multimodal” part of my job means that I help teach communication that uses more than one ‘mode’ at a time, which, technically, is most acts of communication! For example, when we talk about writing, it’s easy to think of it as one mode: the written word. But even in the most boring of boring papers, there’s still more than ‘just words’ going on. You might have a chart, or some other illustration to show (not just tell) what your results were. Even if you don’t have obvious images, you probably chose a specific font, split your ideas up in multiple paragraphs (did you know that ?), and maybe used italics or underline to emphasize some information. Although you might not necessarily recognize those as visual elements of your writing, they do provide the reader with information. Think about what you would be communicating if you submitted a dissertation in the Papyrus font.   

However, understanding multimodal communication, how different modes communicate different things, and how those modes combine to create new meanings,  is an even bigger part of my job when it comes to supporting students in spoken presentations and digital communication. Especially in an academic context, it’s easy to think about a presentation as a script – just the words you’re using, but a sentence that works really well on paper may actually be quite difficult to understand aurally. If you just read a sentence word-for-word out loud without thinking about how it sounds, your audience is probably going to get lost, because they’re not getting information about where clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and even sections begin and end. Adding more modes of communication, like sound (the tone of your voice), visuals (slides) and gestures (body language) can help you make sure you’re giving your audience the best chance at understanding your ideas. Similarly, when you’re writing in a digital context – like on a blog or website – you have access to so many forms of communication, because it’s as easy to embed a gif, for example, as it is to type a word! Online, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about ‘writing’ as a singular mode of communication, because it pretty much always involves audio, images, movement, words – and even links. If you’ve ever fallen down a , you know how much a link can change your understanding of a statement!  

The second part of my job title is “public scholarship,” which might seem like a totally different topic, but it’s actually pretty related. Public Scholarship is all about communicating research clearly to a non-academic audience – and communicating with the non-experts means using all the tools at our disposal to ensure we’re as clear and interesting as possible. This part of my job, then, focuses on supporting scholars who want to get their research across to non-academics, through things like podcasts, blogs, videos, presentations, and pretty much anything else. My current hobby is collecting TikToks that teach a complex concept in an accessible way (also known as knowledge translation), like ,  a�Ի�  – and so many more! You’ll note that these communicators are great at – you guessed it – multimodal communication! They all use visuals, words, sounds, and movement to get their message across. Personally, I believe that all the strategies you use to communicate research to a non-expert audience are also great at helping expert audiences understand your work better. So even if you aren’t ready to talk to the general public about your research just yet, I think it’s still really useful to learn about how we get people excited about our research!  

So my job title just means that I help students figure out how to use all the communication tools they have to make sure their audience (whether that’s a prof or their neighbour, on paper or online!) really understand their ideas.   

You’re in the process of completing your dissertation while working full-time at the Writing and Communication Centre. Which elements of being in the middle (or near the end *FINGERS CROSSED*) of this process have you been able to apply to your work as a writing advisor? What is the most important thing you’ve learned throughout this process?  

It’s not easy writing a dissertation and working full time – there’s a lot that I struggle with, but I do really value the insight that it gives me into the life of any student facing a huge writing project. I can definitely empathize with people who feel a little lost, or who struggle to get their thoughts on paper! I’m a better advisor because I can have an honest conversation with my fellow students about how hard it is to do research when you can’t leave your apartment, or when you’ve never really had to write something as big as a dissertation before, or when you feel like everyone else knows what they’re doing and you don’t… But the most important thing I’ve learned is the value of talking to people about your research and writing. I’ve had so many appointments with students where we didn’t really look at what they’ve written; instead, we talked about their research. It’s a lot easier to write things down after you’ve had a conversation with someone who can ask you questions, push you to articulate the thing that has been hiding in your brain, or just tell you that the thing you’re thinking about is interesting. It’s definitely harder for grad students to have those conversations in the pandemic-world – in my MA and in the early days of my PhD, I’d go for coffee or beer with classmates, vent about my research with people in my shared office, and hear about the questions my peers were asking themselves – and I didn’t really realize how important these interactions were until I started working as an advisor! It’s one of my favourite things to do, though, so if you’re struggling to write stuff… please book an appointment to just chat about your research!   

Over the next two months you’re facilitating the WCC’s Speak Like a Scholar program. What is the program about and why do you think it’s an important part of post-secondary education? Can you give us some highlights of what students can look forward to learning about in SLaS? What is one thing that you wish people looking to get into public scholarship knew about before they begin?   

I’m really passionate about Speak Like a Scholar because I’ve spent a lot of my life learning how to be an effective, engaging speaker that doesn’t get too nervous before giving a presentation – and I really want to share that knowledge with other people. Because public speaking is difficult for a lot of people (it’s one of the most common fears), we often think of it as an innate talent: you’re either good at public speaking, or you aren’t. But I know that it’s a learned skill that just takes practice and knowledge, like any other skill. It’s also a skill that is one of those ‘hidden’ skills of good scholars. It’s pretty easy to understand the importance of writing as an academic: you have to be able to get your ideas across in writing so that you can get published and share your work with other scholars in journals and books. But it might be a little harder to see the value of being a great public speaker, especially if conferences aren’t a really important part of your discipline. However, even if you don’t attend a lot of conferences, I bet you talk about your research more than you write about it: you talk to your supervisors, your lab-mates, your fellow grad students, your parents when they inevitably ask you if you’re done your thesis yet…Understanding the principles of great spoken communication can help you be a better presenter, yes, but they can also just make you a better speaker, full stop! Good speakers are going to be good not just at giving a formal conference presentation, but also at getting their lab-mates on board with a new experiment, or explaining what’s wrong with a particular theory, or helping a family member understand why they’re so interested in this very specific topic.   

You’ll learn how to do these things in SLaS by putting together an academic presentation that you’ll practice in front of your fellow SLaSers, from figuring out what it is you want to say, to outlining your presentation, figuring out your Confident Presenter Persona, putting together a slide deck, and – most importantly – revising all those things with feedback and support from your peers and WCC facilitators.  One of my favourite modules in SLaS is when we talk about what it actually means to “speak like a scholar”: what values do we want to express as speakers (and as audience members!)? What do we say about academic communication when we speak in a certain way? What do we communicate about ourselves as scholars through the words we use, the way we deliver our speeches, and even the clothing we wear while we’re ‘on stage’?   

I wish people understood that although we think of presentations as kind of synonymous with PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Google Slides), that the best presenters don’t even open PowerPoint until they’ve figured out most of what they’re going to say. So many people start working on a presentation by opening PowerPoint, which would be like planning a road-trip by getting in the car. The first steps of a road trip are actually figuring out where you want to go, what sights you want to see along the way, and how you’re going to get there in the time you have. The same is true for great spoken presentations!  

Elise is available for one-to-one and group appointments through our online booking system, . They also host the Tuesday Virtual Writing Cafés and are the lead facilitator of the Writing and Communication Centre's Speak Like a Scholar������Dz�������.����