For the last few years I've had the opportunity to run a workshop on scientific communication for undergraduate researchers preparing for their first poster session. I've always had a knack for explaining things and communicating complex concepts through story so I get invited to these kinds of things semi-regularly. But I've struggled with a conceptual framework for explaining the technical depth requirement to an audience. I can workshop your specific poster all day long, but how do I explain what I'm doing to a room full of students so that they can implement the method themselves?
At its heart, scientific communication is storytelling. There are protagonists and antagonists and events and tension. It doesn't matter that the characters might be cells or steel beams or transistors, and that the events might be cytokine interactions or stress/strain experiments or shifting electro-magnetic fields. There's a narrative and it has an arc and all the other parts that I learned about in Mrs. Duncan's ninth grade English class.
But the story emerges from technical depth and breadth. I can't build the narrative if I don't know who the characters are or how the events unfold. What do they want? What's in the way? We tell our students to "know their material deeply" but that's not actionable. If it's your first time trying to do it, being told to do it is not useful.
And we aren't going for some memorized start-to-finish narrative. We want a genuine structure that we can move around in when we answer questions. Like that movie you have seen so many times that you can just jump into a discussion about any particular scene and instantly remember everything that came before and everything that happens after. Instead of a progression we have an intact web of connected events. This is the framework that allows students to answer questions with genuine agency.
Enter Just One Why.
I tell the undergraduate students in my workshops that I should be able to point to anything on their poster and ask "Why?" one time and that they should be able to answer it. I would push the depth for a graduate student, but for an undergraduate I think this is a great place to start. It's finite. It's achievable. It's an active process that they can go through with their PI or grad student mentor.
But the simplicity stops there. "Why?" is actually a huge question and there's a lot buried in it. "Why did you run a control?" is a hard question for an undergrad to answer with real weight. If I'm being perfectly honest I think a non-trivial number of faculty would have to workshop their answer to avoid something outright tautological. "Why?" can contain so much.
Let's go over a few examples.
Why does this matter?
The scope question. What problem exists in the world that your research is addressing? Is it worth it? Where does this fit into a bigger story? Is this a side quest or the main event?
Why does this happen?
The mechanism question. Maybe you're modeling. How well do you understand the flow of information? Maybe you're building a process. How well do you understand the physics? The transfer of mass or energy? In either case, what impedes the process? What clears the way? What are the necessary conditions? The sufficient conditions? The optimal conditions?
Why does this method produce trustworthy data?
The measurement question. This could be a question about instrumentation. How did you actually take this measurement? What was actually measured? The vast majority of instruments are measuring electrical signals, not the quantity in question. Do you know how that works? What could interfere with that measurement? This one is far more complex than it seems at first. For a complex measurement it might even open up a whole new rabbit hole of Just One Whys.
Why did you choose this method over alternatives?
The design judgement question. Most undergrads never get this far because they often inherit a project with a well developed structure. But this is necessary for the story. What were the other options and why was this one selected? Even if the student did not make the decision it's worth exploring why the decision was made.
Why did you run a control?
The logical structure question. The control eliminates alternative explanations. It collapses the possibility space of the investigation. Genuinely understanding how the control was selected gets to the argument structure of the experiment, not just the mechanics of what happened.
A student who can answer all of these questions has real ownership of the narrative. A question from the audience isn't a threat, it's just a dot on a map they can draw from scratch. They already know where it falls, what surrounds it, and how to find their way home.