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Don’t hit your audience with too much information too fast.
Your verbs may be strong. Your sentences may be short. But if you ask your audience to make too many conceptual leaps at once—or retain a bunch of facts they’ve never heard before while you weave those facts into a tight, complex argument — you’ll lose almost everyone. What do you REALLY want people to know or understand? How do you want them to feel at the end? Pick something big and say it in an unforgettable way.
Make it personal.
This doesn’t mean “tell a story about yourself” (but if you have a good one, then do it!)—it means find the angle on your topic that nobody but you would ever think of. You can absolutely NAIL the mind-bending implications of a time travel paradox just by showing what would happen if you travelled five minutes into the past to bring yourself a bowl of potato chips.
Love your topic (and your audience).
Assume everyone who is listening to you or reading your work is your friend. How would you introduce your friends (smart people who you love) to a scientific idea you’re obsessed with? Tell them a story about it with the same energy you’d tell them about something beautiful or scary or funny or outrageous that happened to you. Show them why this idea makes you feel this way.
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