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Our Communication Lab teams are always thinking about new communication skills and scenarios that we can help to demystify and support. Find our latest resources below:

Blog posts

Quick tips on handy skills and first-hand reflections about communication experiences, from Communication Fellows and MIT community members

We’ve all sat through scientific presentations to find our focus drifting away from the topic at hand, as the patterns in the ceiling tiles suddenly become more interesting than the projected slides. Where does a presenter lose the attention of their audience, and why does this happen?

At conferences, slides with walls of text are often the cue for the audience to take out their phones and check their email as the presenter hurries through a summary of their findings… It doesn’t have to be this way!

Scientific figures do not equally suit all contexts. A figure designed for a paper will often be information-dense; multiple panels illustrate multiple ideas, multiple axes and color bars show the impact of numerous variables, annotations highlight specific caveats, and an extensive caption explains the whole thing.

Brainstorming can be difficult, and I often find clients (and myself) focusing so much on what each sentence should say that we lose track of what our communication medium is trying to convey. Additionally, the brainstorming process is usually writer-focused, i.e. done with the writer’s concerns rather than the audience’s in mind.

Summer has officially come to an end, and with its departure a new semester dawns. And with a new semester come ripe opportunities, scholarly resolutions, and motivating little white lies. I myself have lain in bed the night before the start of classes committed to such delusions as “I will attend my 9:30 lectures” and “I will start my p-sets the day they are assigned.”

Introduced in 2019 by a psychology graduate student, #betterposter is a framework for improving scientific poster design and presentation. The goal is to eliminate large blocks of text—which too often plague academic posters—to improve audience understanding and to make posters more efficient to create and view.

A grad student’s guide to AI in research and science communication.

The faculty job search, while continually evolving in terms of trends and hiring practices, is commonly experienced as a daunting, poorly illuminated, and variable process. While there is no single path to success in finding a faculty job, here we aim to provide some general recommendations based on communication best practices and links to additional resources for further guidance.

New & updated CommKit articles

Discipline-specific how-to’s and annotated examples, covering both technical and professional communication.

For a full directory of all of our CommKit articles, click here.