Press Released

Our lab did something that warranted a press release from the university media relations team. This meant that the relatively grueling six hour training period for a new fancy piece of equipment got interrupted halfway through so that newspaper reporters could take our pictures and do some interviews. The tech guy from the States was clearly 50% amused and 50% weirded out by the media intrusion - I slyly asked him whether he had ever been interviewed while on the job and when he stated emphatically NO! I had to reply back "Welcome to rural Canada. You'll be in the local newspaper tomorrow." Since it didn't snow much while he was here, he got one amusing anecdote to carry back to his home state.

I forgot to tell me mom I was going to be in her daily newspaper, so I got a call later about it :) She even cut out the article so I could read it - the reporter did a decent job communicating our science. Hopefully the other papers did an equally good job (the reporters for the smaller paper was very young looking).

Then last week I did a TV interview too. They wanted my boss to speak of course - he's typically scientific looking (big words/bald head/boy bits) but unfortunately was he was held up teaching a bioinformatics lab for most of the morning. He deigned a ten minute visit at the very end to contribute his sound bites, but the rest he left to me and another (camera shy) worker. So I dutifully answered the dozen or so questions as clearly as I could, and looked on mortified the next day at the online clip as I realized I was guilty of the Valley girl lilt in my voice.

"...what linguists call a high rising terminal. That means ending your sentences with a rising intonation. It's as if you're asking a question with every statement you make."
(read more about it here)

I thought I had trained myself out of this behaviour but NO DICE. I had three sound bites during the piece, and the two first definitely suffered from the rising intonation problem. Luckily, the last statement sounded appropriately serious and definitive. I bitched about it to my boss the next morning when he congratulated me on my "successful science communication":

Me: "Goddamn, I did that thing that I've been telling undergrads for YEARS to stop doing: I spoke with a lilt in my voice that makes it seem like I am unsure of my statement"

Him: "I think we've lost that battle. Generationally speaking, most young women do speak like that now"

Me: "I knowwww....but I thought I was better than that" (stomps foot in frustration)

So NOTE TO SELF: When speaking to media outlets who are likely going to carve your cohesive sounding explanations into little lilting snippets, be sure to always.speak.with.a.downward.terminal.