When people become very specialized in their field of study, they can suffer from the curse of knowledge and find it difficult to explain complex subjects. In order to make these subjects more digestible to readers, it's critical that communicators ask the right questions and find the stories within the story. The next step is making those stories understandable and relatable to a larger audience.
In this episode, Tiffany Fox, director of communications at UC San Diego, and Cheryl Broom, president of Interact Communications, discuss strategies for making stories about complicated topics more accessible for readers.
When people become very specialized in their field of study, they can suffer from the curse of knowledge and find it difficult to explain complex subjects. In order to make these subjects more digestible to readers, it's critical that communicators ask the right questions and find the stories within the story. The next step is making those stories understandable and relatable to a larger audience.
In this episode, Tiffany Fox, director of communications at UC San Diego, and Cheryl Broom, president of Interact Communications, discuss strategies for making stories about complicated topics more accessible for readers.
Marketing for community colleges is tough, but after 20 years of working solely with two-year technical and community colleges, we've learned a few things. Now we want to share them with you. Welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass podcast. If you're looking for expert insights from industry experts, you've come to the right place. Bringing more than two decades of marketing and communications experience, please welcome your host and Interact Communications president Cheryl Broom.
Cheryl Broom:Hi, welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass. Today I'm so happy to welcome my close friend and someone whom I admire greatly, Tiffany Fox. Tiffany is the director of communications for the UC San Diego department of surgery. She has more than two decades of experience in communications, technical writing, public speaking, and marketing. She excels at translating complicated ideas into compelling stories. In this episode, Tiffany talks about how to make your own writing more accessible, particularly when covering complex or even boring topics. She gives great tips on how to uncover what is newsworthy and how to bring emotion into writing. She even gives some great tips on how to use avatars to make your communications more compelling. I'm thrilled to have her as a guest on the podcast and I know that all of our listeners are going to learn a ton. Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us.
Tiffany Fox:It's my pleasure. How fun this will be.
Cheryl Broom:It's going to be a blast! And I've known you, for those of you listening, I've known Tiffany for almost a decade now and she's a fantastic writer, public information officer, and really has had a really interesting and fascinating career. So I thought we could start off by you telling us a little bit about your professional journey.
Tiffany Fox:I would be happy to. My journey, like many people's journey, has been somewhat twisted in the sense that it hasn't taken a straight path from graduation to where I'm at now, but I'm actually pretty glad for that because I've learned so much along the way and I've gotten exposure in many different fields. I started off with degrees in English and journalism thinking that I would become a full time journalist and got my first job out of college, well, after joining the Peace Corps for a couple of years, at the San Diego Union Tribune. And I took an entry level position there just to get my foot in the door. I was literally sorting the mail and it was actually people that—people would joke that it was the most dangerous job at the paper after September 11th because of all the anthrax scares going on in mail rooms. So I quickly got an opportunity to write a book review column within about six months of being hired and that sort of lit the fire underneath me in terms of writing lots of different things for the paper. People saw that I was a good writer and that I could also work on deadlines. So I started writing for the arts sections primarily and I was writing everything from concert reviews to celebrity gossip columns. I also was the editor of a number of young reviewers ranging in age between six and 15, which was a lot of fun. But I saw where newspapers were headed in terms of their economic viability. And I also wanted to get some exposure writing online. So I took a job at UC San Diego for a department that was essentially a technical writing position and I did get some exposure to coding and writing for online publications. And that job was the way, the way that I was able to get an even more suitable job for my personality, also at UC San Diego, at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. And that institute is multi-disciplinary. They have people from about 20 to 30 different academic departments represented, which meant that I could write about everything from the arts, which is what my experience had been in, to science and technology, which was brand new to me at the time. But it was funny because I quickly realized that I preferred writing about science and technology over the arts. And that was primarily because they're more concrete, they're more, in a lot of cases, cutting edge. But the good thing was that I was able to write some art stories on the side as well. So that job, I was there for about 10 years, and my boss was an old school journalist who treated the newsroom and the institute as he would a real journalistic newsroom. So we were cranking out stories that were a very high, high journalistic quality, even though it was technically a public relations job. And I also learned a tremendous amount about the sciences and technology and how to write about science and technology. And that led to me getting a job training researchers and academics in how to communicate about science and technology. I have ended up teaching for UC San Diego, UC San Diego extension, which is where I continue to teach to this day. I teach, I co-teach Science Writing 1. And I also eventually got a job as director of communications for the department of surgery at UC San Diego. So I have a couple of different communications positions as well as being a freelance journalist on the side.
Cheryl Broom:It's such a fascinating, fascinating career that you've moved from, from arts to science. Do you find that they're really different?
Tiffany Fox:I do and I don't. Both of them require talking to individuals about something that is very clear to them because they're the person either creating the art or doing the science, but is esoteric or abstract to a lot of audiences. And that requires a, what I call a curation and translation. So when I speak with people and I do traditional interviews, I take what they tell me and I curate that content into bits and pieces that would be most interesting to the lay public or to the general audience that I'm writing for. And given that I'm writing about academic research for the general public, what I choose to curate might be different than what the academic artist or scientist thinks is important. So it's really me thinking as, with beginner mind as a lay person, what about this experiment or this work would be interesting to the general public and how can I make it so that they understand what this person is doing? And that's where overcoming the curse of knowledge really comes in. A lot of academics have been working in their field for decades and become very, very specialized, and they suffer in a lot of cases from the curse of knowledge. They forget that what they know is not something most people know about, and the terminology they use might not be familiar to audiences. So I love this quotation. I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but the quotation is"never underestimate people's intelligence, but always underestimate their vocabulary." And that just means that people are smart and they want to learn and they want to understand, but they just might not understand the words you're using. So if you're using a word like stochastic, when you really mean chaotic, I might in my story that I write about your work, use the more familiar terminology or at least explain what stochastic means, using terms people can understand. And that goes for writing about, you know, performance art that might be very bizarre to people, to writing about the latest, greatest digital or optical technologies that undermine everything that we use from our cell phones to surgical equipment.
Cheryl Broom:I mean, you really go beyond just translating. You actually find stories within work that otherwise could be viewed as boring or difficult to understand.
Tiffany Fox:That's right. And that is a huge part of this job. This is the kind of job that's perfect for someone like me who is never bored. I can find the story in anything. In fact, I've definitely been in situations where I've been in an academic conference, for example, and I've been listening to a talk that was highly technical, difficult to understand. And I know that at the end of the day, I have to get a story out of it. So I've learned over the years different tools and techniques for doing that, from everything from taking really great notes and trusting that I will be able to figure them out later, to asking graduate students during the coffee hour,"you know, you sat in that talk along with me. Could you maybe explain what the professor was getting at in terms I can understand?", to Googling things when I need to, to asking experts who might understand this field and might be better communicators. I spend a lot time just trying to get a sense for the basics of a field, which gives me a lot of really broad knowledge that is an inch deep. Most journalists would say they know a lot about, a lot of just, they know a little bit about a lot of things but not a whole lot about any one thing. And that is sort of an occupational hazard of this job. But it's also a real benefit because it allows me to draw parallels between fields as well. And that can come in handy when I'm explaining concepts that are difficult to understand because I can use metaphors. So when I'm talking about, for example, let's say an atom. And I want to, I'm writing, say I'm writing a story about storing data in atoms at the atomic level. And I want to get across to my audience how spacious an atom is. Most people have no concept because they think of an atom as being very, very tiny. But if you think about a bee inside of a cathedral, the bee represents the nucleus of the atom and the cathedral is the atom itself. And that just goes to show that there is a lot of space in an atom in which you could store data, which makes this very exciting in terms of the future of data storage. So using these types of metaphors where I assume the public has a general understanding of certain things, and taking that understanding to extrapolate and explain meaning that might be, might be abstract to them is not only a really important part of my job, it's the part of my job I love the most. I love creating metaphors, visual representations, storytelling to explain concepts. This is the heart of science writing and it's something that we teach in our extension class. This is a specialized skill and it can be taught. It is not just an art. And these concepts are really, really valuable in terms of getting, not only getting science across, but progressing science. Science does not end when an experiment concludes, it ends once that scientific experiment or that scientific research has been shared with the public, with other researchers, with other scientists, and we know that research is increasingly interdisciplinary. Engineers are working with clinicians and artists are working with archeologists, and if they cannot understand one another's work, then they can't collaborate. So explaining what they do to one another becomes a communications problem. And that's where I come in.
Cheryl Broom:Now, and then this is why I wanted you to come on the podcast, because community colleges don't necessarily do a lot of research. There are some colleges out there who have faculty members or administrators who are involved in scientific research, but it's pretty minimal because most faculty who are interested in doing that depth of research go on to four-year colleges and universities. But what we do have is a lot of faculty members who are very excited about their fields of study, events they put on, maybe papers they've written. And I think with all of the duties that our directors of communications have going on, I know there's times where faculty walk in their office and they think to themselves, nobody cares about, nobody cares about this. This is a terrible story. Do you have any advice on on how to get into something and tell a story, how to find where the story is, what type of questions to ask, how do you go about uncovering something that would be newsworthy?
Tiffany Fox:Hmm, that's a really good question because a lot of people assume what they think is newsworthy is newsworthy to other people. And that is sometimes the case, but it's not always the case. So I always like to try to think about a story from the perspective of three different stakeholders, we'll say. And at the academic world is typically a graduate student or just a student of any kind, a funder of some kind because everyone in the academic world is looking for funding. But even in community colleges, funding is important. And then just what I like to call a grandparent. So this is the person who really is not affiliated with the community college or the university, but they're interested. They're generally interested in finding out what is this community college up to, what are, what is the type of work that these professors are doing. So when I write any kind of story, I keep these three, I sort of refer to them as avatars, in mind. And I want to give them each some sort of thing that they can take away from the story. So for a student, it's typically going to be, obviously, a more informational, academic perspective on this work. For a funder it is what, you know, the, what's the takeaway, what's in it for me? What is the,"so what?", why should I care about this and how am I going to get a return on my investment? What's the end goal of this work? And then for a grandparent, it is essentially to communicate to them without condescending. Because again, we don't want to dumb things down. And as a matter of fact, I really dislike that phrase. I'll often get pushback from people who are very much wrapped up in their work and they want to get their work across to people without making any concessions to make it more accessible and easy to understand. And they'll say,"oh, don't dumb it down." And I, because I think of it more like translation, I like to say to them, if I were to translate this into Spanish or Hindi or French, you would never consider that dumbing it down. It's just a different way of communicating. So for the grandparent, I like to put the emphasis on accessibility, assuming that they might not be familiar with the concepts. As far as uncovering the story, I think it's really important just to have a beginner mind and think to yourself from an emotional standpoint, because emotions are so important to storytelling. What does this information make me feel? And we can take this all the way back to Aristotle. Aristotle's three pillars of persuasive communication were ethos, which is your credibility. So obviously the credibility here is the person is an expert in their field and they're doing this work. And then there is logos, which is all the facts, figures, data, all of this information that is typically in a story about science. But then a lot of, the thing that a lot of people forget is the third pillar, which is pathos[corrected], which is the emotional part of the story. So, a lot of times with research or any kind of scientific work or technical work or even art, of course, there are emotions evoked. Something is going to make a disease obsolete, which brings a sense of relief. Something is going to make something less expensive, which brings a sense of relief, joy. Something is going to, let's say, solve a problem of any kind. I mean, these things are all things that impact human emotion. So stories, and covering stories, is really a matter of finding the thing that will make people feel something. And I always tell my students and incorporate into my own writing that third pillar of ethos, or excuse me, of pathos, which is just really the fundamental concept of a good, readable, interesting, and memorable story.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I think we try to do that on the marketing side as well. We have so many clients who for years have been telling students to go to community college because it's affordable and close to home, and that's not emotional at all. So let's talk, tell the story of what happens when you actually go to college. How does your world expand? And I love this idea of approaching your writing from these avatars and I see that is, could be a really useful exercise to use, even for general marketing, is how to tell those stories to those three different audiences. That's really great advice.
Tiffany Fox:Thank you.
Cheryl Broom:Well, we also had before, we, when we were talking about doing this podcast, you had mentioned something that I had never heard about, which is the six-way rule. And I was hoping that you could cover that again for our listeners.
Tiffany Fox:Of course, the six-way rule is great. This is a concept I picked up somewhere from, I'm assuming someone in marketing and communications at some point, and the six-way rule is really the concept of writing about something and then using it six different ways. And so I'll give you an example from my own career. Right now, the UC San Diego health sciences has a center for the future of surgery. And it is going to be expanding, and we're having a big event in October. And of course it's my job as director of communications to get the word out. So we are collecting information about this expansion, everything from square footage to the types of technologies that are being implemented there to the ways it's going to be used. And of course, how it will impact patients in the future. How it will make their lives better, basically. And so what I'll do is we'll work together with the marketing office to write a press release and then we'll pull pieces of that press release and use it in other ways. We'll make some social media posts out of it. We will put some stuff on Twitter, we'll collect some imagery for Instagram. We will likely do some digital signage. We will likely send out sort of a, an alert to the campus community using the tools that the campus community uses from the shuttle bus signs to Snapchat. So this is the six-way rule. How can you take one communication and use it in six ways? And it doesn't have to be six ways of course, but ideally it is multiple ways, because not only are you getting the word out to a higher degree, you're also not reinventing the wheel every time that you have to put out a communication. You just repurpose things, format them for the appropriate platform, and you get greater impacts that way and also make sure that you reach everyone the way they like to be communicated to.
Cheryl Broom:That's fantastic. I love, I call it a content cluster, which is not nearly as interesting as the six-way rule, but I like, I like the six- way rule a lot better but, but basically, yeah, for an event, your core topic is in the center of your cluster and then you have spokes coming out with as many different ways as possible to reuse that content or to even do spin-offs. So, you know, for example, if you were talking about your brand, you can do some blog posts about refocusing your brand, naming your new brand, creating your new brand. So it gives you a way to break off kind of complicated topics into clusters that you could further explore. And of course that's all dependent on actually having the time to do that, which is always a challenge. Always. Yeah, and I was interested in hearing more about, about your time being the director of communications for the department of surgery. What is that like, like what are your day-to-day tasks? Who do you work with? I'd love to hear more about your career.
Tiffany Fox:Sure. I answer to the department chair, who is also a surgeon and he has an MBA, so he's a great boss in the sense that he understands the value of communications for the department. So my day-to-day life is really, there is no day-to-day life because it's different every day. But some of my responsibilities include putting out a monthly newsletter about everything happening in the department. The audience is generally surgeons within the department, staff within the department, peers, colleagues. It is not patients, because we have separate communications for them. So I focus more on the academic side of things rather than the clinical side of things. But it does involve a fair amount of science writing because we also have, of course, clinical advances and research advances that we want to highlight. I maintain the website in terms of content. I'm not the web master. And I also handle the annual report every year, which is essentially a yearbook for the department. It's a lot of work, but it's just about one quarter of the year. So that frees up my time for other projects. I handle all of the social media. I also took it upon myself to create a newsletter for the staff and faculty about communication and how they can use communication tools to enhance our brand. So this is, you know, how do you talk about P value for the general public? And if you're not in research, P value is, it shows statistical significance. How can you, how can we understand our patients better by learning their stories? What should be in my email signature? Because of course your email signature is also part of the brand, the brand for the department. How can I get my news into the department newsletter? This kind of thing. So it's just showing them that they also also are responsible for communicating, that it's not all on my shoulders. And I have all kinds of projects I'm working on, on a temporary basis from the CFS Center for Future of Surgery project I mentioned. Once the expansion event has happened, we'll also work on optimizing their search engine visibility and also work on maybe setting up some Google ads for them. And that's new to me actually, so I'll be learning how to do Google ads. And really it's so much all the time, always something happening. Fortunately I have a fantastic intern who's premed and also interested in communication, so she helps me a lot. But other than her, I'm a one-woman department and it's a lot of fun because I have autonomy and my expertise is valued because I'm working with people who specialize in health and medicine and I'm really the only person there who specializes in communication. So they lean on me and value me and come to me for expertise and advice. And as far as time and how to manage time, I've had to get very good at that. And it is a matter of triage in a lot of ways. Just, what is most important today? What are my most important tasks? What can wait? I have this really intricate email system that works wonderfully for me, and I've taught it to my intern, and we're trying to spread the gospel about that because, for a lot of us, our email is our inbox. So managing that in a way that is efficient is very important in this type of job. And also making sure that I'm communicating to the people that I need content from what the timeframe is. When I'm working with surgeons, of course they have extremely busy schedules and a lot of them literally are doing brain surgery. So their brain surgery is much more important than my newsletter and I have to keep on them and just make sure that I'm, in a very diplomatic way, putting a fire under them to give me what I need. So I've learned to be diplomatic and also assertive in that regard.
Cheryl Broom:I think a lot of our listeners are going to take inspiration from you, especially for the fact that you have to track down brain surgeons for[inaudible] quotes.
Tiffany Fox:Not an easy job.
Cheryl Broom:No. We think community college faculty members are difficult to get ahold of. I can't even imagine trying to reach a surgeon.
Tiffany Fox:Yes. Yes. And in community colleges, you know, a lot of, from what I understand, what happens in community college from an academic perspective is very similar to a university. So there are many, many federated departments that are all doing their own thing. And it can be complicated to get anything synchronized. So I feel for you as well if you're working in a community college. Not easy for any of us.
Cheryl Broom:No. You know, and it's difficult, but it's also wonderful because unlike universities, community colleges have one central communications department and they don't have communicators embedded within schools. So you have to be, you know, you're a generalist. But there are so many occasions when somebody comes with a story idea or with some work they've done on sabbatical, and all of a sudden you're thrown into having to communicate something that you're completely unfamiliar with. So I really appreciate the ideas that you've given us on how to approach that difficult communications. It sounds like to you, it's not difficult anymore, but to the rest of us, having to talk about science and these really in-depth academic topics can be a struggle. So is there anything else?
Tiffany Fox:It's still a struggle for me on occasion because they, health and medicine are always changing and these academic surgeons and care providers specialize in very, very well-specialized fields. So, for me, I also have to be a generalist. We have 13 academic divisions in the department of surgery, so I'm covering everything from liver transplants to heart transplants to brain and neurosurgery to just general anatomy, pediatric surgery. So I do have to be a generalist as well. And the best advice I have for when someone finds themselves in a position like that is to remember that it is literally our job as communicators to ask quote unquote stupid questions. So when I'm sitting down and interviewing, as I just did earlier this week, the head of the cardiac transplant program, and he's throwing out terms that I'm not familiar with, it's my job to say,"could you please explain to me in one sentence what that means?" and not be afraid to do that. Because, you know, even though I'm with the department of surgery and I'm embedded in that department, I'm not a surgeon and I'm not going to know every term that all the surgeons use. And they're always very gracious about that. And they, because they realize how specialized they all are, are familiar with explaining these basic concepts even to their peers because they are from different divisions. So I've learned to never be afraid to ask someone to clarify or repeat something they've said and to really just be humble when it comes to that. Because if I, at the end of the day, can't explain to my readers what the concepts are that this person's explaining, then I haven't done my job. So I've learned not to be the smartest person in the room and to be glad I'm not the smartest person in the room.
Cheryl Broom:Well, and that brings me back to where you and I met, you know, 10 years ago, in a leadership, a yearlong leadership seminar. And I always admired how well you ask questions. You literally ask the best questions.
Tiffany Fox:Thank you. I learned that through trial and error.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. I always, always am more impressed with your questions than the answers.
Tiffany Fox:Very nice compliment. Well, I am a professional question asker, so it makes sense.
Cheryl Broom:Well, I have to keep that in mind for myself. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions because it is the only way you're going to learn.
Tiffany Fox:That's right.
Cheryl Broom:And speaking of learning, you teach a course in science writing and a lot of our listeners are from all over the United States and yours is here in San Diego. But there might be something in a community near them. Can you tell us a little bit about your class and how they can find you?
Tiffany Fox:Sure. And we're actually about to go online.
Cheryl Broom:Oh, exciting!
Tiffany Fox:So hopefully anyone around the country would be able to access us. So I would, if someone is interested in science writing, fortunately more and more campuses at universities, I'm not sure about community colleges, are starting to offer science communication as a either elective or even a program of study. And it is starting to become really an emerging profession, especially for people that get into the sciences and realize, you know, there's really not a whole lot of upward mobility in this track. Say they plan to get a tenure track teaching profession or position, well, there aren't a whole lot of those, and say they, or they go into a laboratory and find, you know, I really don't like pipetting all day or I'm just not cut out to be a scientist, but I still want to be in science somehow. So science communication is a great alternative because I'm still steeped in the world of science and technology every day, but I'm not actually doing the science. So looking for a research or science communication program is a good bet because they're probably going to offer classes and science writing, even video podcasting. The UCSB extension program now has a certificate in science communication that includes our Science Writing 1 class as a required course, as well as Science Writing 2, which is more like a workshop course, and then a whole host of electives in everything from, I want to say nonfiction writing and podcasting video. You name it. So it's starting to become a real thing. And if you want to get a sense for the type of people who work in this field, the best thing you can do is go on Twitter and search for the hashtag"scicomm," that's hashtag S C I C O M M, or hashtag"medcomm" if you're interested in medical communication. These, both of these hashtags will lead you to a robust community of people who are involved in this field and they love tweeting. So you'll find lots of content, lots of ideas for science communication or medical communication, job opportunities, fellowship opportunities, grant opportunities, all kinds of things. So that's really a great place to start.
Cheryl Broom:Well, wonderful. Well, I have been talked into enrolling in your class, so let me know when it's online.
Tiffany Fox:Fantastic! I would love to have you. You'll be a star student, I'm sure.
Cheryl Broom:I hope so. We'll have to wait and see about that. Besides teaching, I know you also, you do do some freelance work. For anybody interested in talking to you about that, if they have a project that might require your expertise, how do they get in touch with you?
Tiffany Fox:They can email me, and my email address is Tiffany M Fox, Tiffany T I double-F A N Y, M like Marie, Fox like the animal, at gmail.com, and I am happy to discuss any kind of freelance opportunities from writing to proofreading to editing. I've edited books. I have written content for journalistic publications as well as academic institutions that need a writer for just on a contract basis. I'm actually doing some work right now for San Diego State University on a freelance basis for their cyber infrastructure office. They want to do a cyber security awareness month and they needed a creative writer. So I used my network and found that position. But I, the good thing about being a writer is if you're a good writer, you can write about pretty much anything because all of the same concepts that apply to creative writing apply to writing creatively about nonfiction topics and all this, all of the fundamentals about writing for nonfiction apply to creative writing. So if you're a trained writer or even just someone who naturally is a gifted writer, then finding work is usually not a problem. It really boils down to having an expansive network. So using LinkedIn, using social media and all of those tools have been really important for my freelance career and I am always on the market, always looking for work. So please reach out to me if you have any kind of need for communication.
Cheryl Broom:Well, great. Well, thank you so much, Tiffany, for joining me and talking about all the wonderful ways that you make complex stories come to life. I've learned so much.
Tiffany Fox:I really enjoyed being on this podcast and I think what you're doing is so important. So kudos to you.
Cheryl Broom:Oh, thank you so much. Well, I appreciate your time and, for those of you listening, Tiffany's also a friend of mine, so if you're interested in talking to her directly, feel free to shoot me over an email and I can also connect you as well. So with that, Tiffany, I know you are on your lunch break and you've been sitting outside UCSD Health.
Tiffany Fox:Yes, yes.
Cheryl Broom:Please go back in and do what you're so great at and thank you again for joining me.
Tiffany Fox:Okay, thank you Cheryl. I'll talk to you soon.
Cheryl Broom:Okay, talk to you soon.
Tiffany Fox:Bye-bye.
Cheryl Broom:That wraps up this edition of Community College Marketing MasterClass. If you are interested in more writing tips, make sure to check out my previous podcast with former journalist and current Grossmont-Cuyamaca director of communications Anne Krueger, who has great advice on how to be more persuasive and get better results with press releases and the news media. Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time.
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