My TED Talk; or, Why Not To Change Your Topic 36 Hours Before Deliviring a Speech
As you might well surmise from the title of this blog post, the preparation process for my TED Talk took something of a turn for the unconventional partway through. This in fact stems less from what I did read in preparation for my talks as much as from what I did not read. I had prepared a talk that, due to a lack of reading of the assignment sheet and a few bad assumptions, was only tangentially related to the research that I had already conducted. Late on Tuesday evening, as I was practicing my speech, my instincts told me that my speech might not be related enough to my research to fulfill the requirements on the assignment sheet. Sure enough, it did not fit the requirements, and I wrote and practiced an entirely new speech on that day and the day after. Beyond my correction of this oversight, the reading with the greatest influence on my final talk was certainly all of that reading that informed me to make my speech a narrative. I found that framing the growth in the anti-scie...