A Rhetorical Analysis Of TED Talk By Melissa Marshall

In Scotland, summer of 2012, Melissa Marshall spoke at a TED Talk titled “Talk Nerdy to me”. In this short and direct speech, she illustrated to the audience the importance of being knowledgeable of what was occuring in the scientific field. Coinciding with that, she said that scientists should want and need to make that knowledge accessible and comprehensible to the public. In her mind, it would be beneficial to everyone if scientists involved the public in discoveries about great issues in our world such as health care, the environment, energy resources, etc. In order to build a bridge of communication, Marshall outlined some general tips for scientists and engineers on how to better bring the public into their wonderland.
The points Marshall made seemed to flow together, however, it was not in the usual fashion. The transitions from one idea to the next appeared to blend and blur together, as if she tacked on the beginning of one subject to the end of another. From this perspective, it could be described that the speaker did not effortlessly swing coherently from one idea to the next. Despite the different organization of her speech, one thing she did make sure to do was keep eye contact with her audience. She also

To further support her point that scientists need to tell the general population why their work is relevant, she posted a visual of relevance venn diagram. With another point, she included a visual of a brick barrier to display how the use of jargon can be a barrier between scientific ideas and normal folk. In addition, for her point on making ideas accessible to both the public and their mind, she orally cited and projected a quote from the great Albert Einstein. Also, for her point on how bullet points can literally kill a presentation, she compared a bulleted list to another display that was more pleasing to the eye, in her