Soundbites
It’s cool when you can summarise your research in a tweet. I loved the challenge of explaining my work so that a layperson could understand.
I explore ways to tell apart complicated knotted structures. For my PhD, I found several new processes and results using maths!
There might be some value in breaking down your chapters or key results into soundbites, as a reflective exercise. You could start off with 100 words to summarise a chapter, then try to do it in 25. Could you explain a chapter in ten words? You’d lose something, but it could help you to think through what’s important.
Just remember: this might help you to reflect on your work, but you’ll need more words to tell your research story to your examiners. You can’t predict all of their questions ahead of time, but you can be sure that they want more than a quip.