 So again, I'd like to welcome you all here to today's panel, Storytelling and Strategy. So storytelling can mean so many things and our panel will surely demonstrate this. I think that's one of the really exciting things about this topic today. And so I'm really delighted to be with you all on this panel and let's get started. So my name is Marissa Fond. I'll be your moderator today. I'm an assistant teaching professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. And I'm also an active applied sociolinguist and I do a lot of work outside of academia and have for many years. And I draw on my background in the federal government, social science, research nonprofits and an industry in my work as a researcher and strategy consultant. So, and it's a pleasure to have some of my colleagues on the panel today. So again, I'd like to introduce Rachel Lorsch who will be our Zoom producer and we'll provide some resources in the chat for you all as well. And so now I'd like to introduce our three esteemed panelists for today, Alexandra Bouti, Hannah Sullivan and Leah Chappardana. I'd certainly prefer that they introduce themselves so that they can give you a real sense of the work that they do and the really interesting diversity of approaches that we have on our panel today. So we're really grateful to have their talent and time today. So let's start with those introductions. So I'd like to start with you, Alex. Can you tell us a bit about your training and linguistics and also about the work that you do now. Yes, hi, thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight to be here. So I got my master's in language and communication at Georgetown University, which is for those who don't know a sort of more professionally focused socio-linguistics degree, where I was able to study a huge variety of things. But the things that were of most interest to me that I really honed in on by the end had to do with discourse analysis. Basically, I was very interested in epistemic management and conversation. I was also extremely interested in identity construction. I grew up bilingual French English and that sort of informed a lot of how I approached my academic life. And then through some twists of fate, I ended up in journalism where I find myself drawing on the skills that I got as a student of linguistics very often, actually. And I'll be excited to talk about that. But I am now the senior producer of the Daily News Podcast Axios today for the Journalism, excuse me, Organization Axios. I don't know how many of you have heard of it, but before that I worked for about eight years in public media, working for two MPR affiliated shows and a PRX affiliated show. So I have done kind of every version of producing audio that you can do. And I'll be excited to share with you the ways that linguistics has informed my choices along the way. Great, thanks so much, Alex and Hannah. Yeah, hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here, really excited to have a conversation with you all. I, like you Marisa, would also identify as an applied sociolinguist. And I think of that basically just in the sense that linguistics has been the common thread through which I see or understand my role in the various industries that I've worked in. So I also graduated from the MLC program at Georgetown, where my interests were primarily in conversation and discourse analysis, was also similarly interested in identity construction, a good amount of my studies while at Georgetown were also in the Arabic language and I've spent some time living and working in the Middle East. So identity construction was a big piece of what I looked into in linguistics. And then a little bit of corpus analysis as well, was I wish I had gotten to dig even deeper into the quant area of linguistics while I had been in the MLC program, but those are sort of my two core interests within linguistics. And then since graduating from the MLC, I have worked in international development where I was working as a project coordinator and as a researcher looking to find the right way to understand how women in Jordan were, what kinds of security issues that they faced in order to craft policy around that. So I can dive into how that relates to storytelling a little bit later. And then from there, I worked in academic research for a project called The Bridge Initiative, doing research on Islamophobia and tracking anti-Muslim discourse online to understand how that was negatively impacting Muslims living in the United States. And then currently I am working in business. So I work for a language strategy firm called Ms. Lansky and Partners where I'm a senior language strategist and we work with clients to find the exact right language to trigger a shift in behavior or a shift in perception. So storytelling has definitely been a common thread in each of the things that I have done over the past six or so years and excited to delve into it deeper with you all and unpack storytelling a bit. Great, thank you so much, Hannah. And Leah. So hi, everyone. Yeah, so I am again an applied linguist as well. I work in the healthcare market research space. Currently in my role, I lead a research team of communication scientists and linguists where we examine the conversation that happens between patients and doctors at the point of care. So when patients see their doctor, what happens there? So that's my current role. How I got here. I have a linguistics degree from the University of Michigan, graduate work at Wayne State University in Detroit was really super interested in sociolinguistics which is why I chose Wayne State. And then when I was there, I was interested in everything. So I mean, I just loved everything I was doing but I ended up spending a lot of time in socio and a lot of time in anthral linguistics and that's the background there. I have always really been interested in how people process new information. And so cognitive linguistics also was a big part of the socio and anthral that I was looking at the interaction between two people when they're speaking, what each person brings to the conversation in terms of understanding what they walk away with. So actually that has really informed what I do today which is a lot of patient education analysis. And once I was done with school, I worked as a consultant in a couple of tangential fields, copy editing, some marketing, oh gosh, what else did I do? I did a couple of different things in those few years as a consultant and then I ended up in social media. So what I did was linguistic analysis of patients talking to patients online about their conditions. I did that for many years, it was fascinating, very unstructured data, very messy data but really in really compelling narratives that you can pull from that. Environment and then that's how I was led to the role I'm in now. Great, thank you, Leah. So as we can see, three panelists with very different current roles and current work. And to dive into the theme of our panel today, I'd like to ask each of our panelists to think about this idea of storytelling. So we as linguists, we certainly know that storytelling is such a universal, such a human thing and we make sense of so much of our worlds through storytelling. But in the professional environments in which we are working, storytelling can actually mean a lot of different kinds of strategic approaches or products. So to kick off our discussion of storytelling, I'd like to ask each of our panelists how they define storytelling. So in the work that you do now, how do you define storytelling or perhaps you use another term for it that isn't storytelling. And if that's the case, of course, I hope you'll indicate that. So why don't we start with you, Hannah and we'll go from there. Sure, yeah, I think quite simply I would put storytelling as finding the language that can resonate with an audience emotionally. So what is the language that can get people to see themselves and or could be seen in the story that you're telling in order to really just connect. I think from a very fundamental, simple level, it's about the language that can land with somebody emotionally, allowing them to see themselves or connect with somebody else. And then from there, what you do with that story is important too, but just from a definitions level, that's where I would lead. Great, and if I could just follow up with you really quickly here. When you think about something that resonates emotionally, how do you unpack that? Like, do you know it when you see it or how do you know that that's happening? That's a good question. I think it's about trying to understand putting yourself in your audience's shoes. So trying to understand what they might be feeling and connecting with that. So if you want somebody to feel secure that you are going to, whether that's be a good friend or whether that is to be a good business partner or if you're an insurance company, what can you say that will help them feel reassured and what are the different ways in to talk about that? Interesting. Okay, so a real focus on storytelling as a way to connect as you said and a real focus on emotions. Like that's what this is essentially about for you in your work right now. Yeah, okay. I think you can definitely, you can use a lot of different words, but unless you are able to actually connect with somebody emotionally and unless those words impact somebody, that's what they're going to remember. So people will always remember how you made them feel, right? A bit of a cliche, but I think it's very, very true when it comes to storytelling because that's what sticks in our mind, what connects with us and what makes us want to tell that story again. Okay, great. So not only emotion, but also memorability stickiness is a really important part of storytelling in your work. Great, great. Okay, that's interesting. So let's move on to Leah. Leah, how does story function in your work? Sure, absolutely. So a lot of the work we do is about patient education or the patient journey, right? And so we will take our data, our findings and map them across the patient journey. And we will present that as a story within a storyline because from the framework, from the frame of the patient experience because like Hannah said, we want to have our client walk through this journey with the patient. So the insights are revealed to them from within that frame. And it's really compelling and powerful when you provide data and insights in a memorable way, in a relatable way, in an easy, digest way for the client rather than just saying, okay, this is what we found. Here's XYZ, here's your charts and graphs, here's the data, we could present things that way but it just, it won't hit home and clients won't remember it. And so we do take our findings, work them into the story of like the patient experience in many cases. And honestly, storytelling is, we're gonna talk about strategy but storytelling is a strategy. And it's a really important strategy to take when you're sharing information. Yeah, I mean, I hear you echoing that theme about memorability and stickiness. And it's not just about like what the public or the target audience remembers, but also, I mean, just in terms of a way to communicate with clients, it's an important aspect of it. I'm sure that's true for you as well, Hannah, in your work. And Leigh, if you don't mind, I know the answer to this because we have worked on this together, but could you tell us a little bit about what that patient journey means in your work? Like what is that? Right, so when we talk about a patient journey, we're, so remember as a recap, what we do at Verilug as an agency is we record doctors and patients talking to one another when the patient comes into the visit. So we get a lot of cross-sectional data points. So when we're interested in investigating what the patient experienced throughout a diagnosis, throughout a journey is, we're looking at lots of conversations from lots of different patients at lots of different points to create this plot, to plot out the timeline from diagnosis to treat, to successful treatment, to, you know, being controlled, whatever condition they're managing. And so that's the patient journey we have as our baseline, right? Maybe we're only focused on the diagnosis journey in some cases, but that's a subtext there. But that patient journey is, what is the patient experiencing from symptom onset to managing a condition? What is that? That's a very real timeline. Now, like I said, we don't have longitudinal data. We're not, you know, recording one patient across their journey. We're recording hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients at different points and aggregating that data and then laying it onto the timeline and saying, okay, what is this? And then we will, sometimes it's two or three journeys we're sharing because sometimes the path isn't always the same. So we might be telling two or three stories within one report, but walking the client through that particular experience from the perspective of the patient is really powerful. It's really powerful. Hope that helps, Marisa. That answers your question. Yes, yes. And, you know, certainly any of us here who have studied metaphor will recognize the power of that journey metaphor for its recognizability and its power in sorting through complex information. So like, oh, can I organize all of this stuff in a way that, you know, feels like a journey? Yeah. Not, Marisa, I'm sorry. I just got to add on there. Sometimes that's the easiest way is to talk about the timeline, but sometimes the journeys aren't like straight timelines, right? Sometimes there's psychological journeys. Sometimes it's an acceptance journey, you know, and it might not be this very clean, straight timeline, but that's just the easiest way to describe it here. Oh, definitely. But any journey from point A to point B, whichever route it takes is what we want to follow up. Yeah, exactly. And as you mentioned earlier, these data are messy as any kind of, you know, language data like these will be. And so, yeah, embracing that mess is crucial. Great. Okay, thanks, Leah. And Alex, storytelling. So you can in many ways replace the word client in what Leah and Hannah said and replace that with listener or reader. And a lot of that actually really applies in my world because that concept of putting things out there in a way that is going to be memorable and sticky is central to what any journalist does, right? There's a lot that you can read and listen to in the world and how are you going to present people with something that really matters that they are going to choose to continue to follow again and again. But what's a little bit different in my case, of course, is that everything is about the story, right? So a huge part, what I would say is a huge part of what I do and think about is how to identify a story to begin with. So obviously storytelling as a strategy is a piece of this, but for me, it's also looking at messy, very messy, often complicated, huge amounts of data. And maybe that's interviews with people. Maybe that's many years of records about a topic. Maybe that's lots of other coverage. Looking for the story in those big chunks of different kinds of data is a huge part of what I do. So I very much relate to sort of this idea of thinking so much about how to use things like metaphor to actually present the story. But I would say I spend at least as much time thinking about why this is the story that needs to be told. So I think for me, that has a lot to do with sort of trying to break through the noise of existing coverage, of existing work that is trying to sort of do what I do and make a convincing case as I think someone, Hannah, you might do for a client for why this is the way this story needs to be told. So there are actually some interesting overlaps, I think, from what you guys do. Yeah, I agree. That's really interesting. And as you're saying, Alex, it's really so much that pulling a story out of so much data is such a powerful act because you're making sense of something and you're making it sticky in an intentional way. It's not an accident. And those choices of metaphors, of ways to tell a story are very consequential. And certainly as linguists, we are primed to attend to those kinds of things. Yeah, and I would just sort of quickly add that so much of my work is also about listening to the way the stories are being told by others. And then this is where some of, I mean, without going too far down this road right now, but this is where some of the interaction of sociolinguistic stuff comes in where I'm listening for what isn't being said in a way that I think others may not be as attuned to. And that can often lead me to the story. I've gone on reporting trips where interviews did not go where I thought they would. And the follow-up was possible because I was seeing things through a sociolinguistic lens and I was thinking about the sort of noisy knots in the conversations. So, yeah. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I think as linguists, like with such an intense focus on language, we can, sometimes it's difficult, but we can more easily imagine alternatives. So, how could this have been expressed differently? Why was it expressed this way? What are the implications of that? Because you have kind of more of a sense of the many, many options that are available to us as communicators. Can I just add one other quick thing just on this sort of definitional thing? I will also say that I think going in, thinking about what storytelling is and does a huge part also, what I think about is, is who is telling a story and why they have access to or the right to that story because that is so much, that informs so much of what I do. Making sure that those things align, the sort of, not just access, but ownership of a story. So where the source of the story is obviously so central as well. So, if people are thinking about how to make linguistics sort of work in a journalist life, that's so much of it is listening to other people's stories and trying to really understand where they come from. Yeah, such a tie back to the interest in epistemics right there. Yeah, no, I mean, it's always so heartening to think about how those interests that we develop in our training can actually be tools that we use in our work. And the next kind of question that I have for you all, maybe we can do kind of an intersection here because you've mentioned the intersections of storytelling with strategy. And that's such an important theme here. And I think that we all think about strategy slightly differently. So I want to ask you about that. So how does storytelling intersect with strategy? But also, because I think that examples are so helpful, like the concreteness of them, I wanted to ask you if you had an example from your work that you could share where storytelling came into play. So maybe these two questions align or maybe they don't, but let's start and see what happens. So Leah, why don't we start with you? Absolutely, and actually I'm gonna kind of get a little meta here and talk about storytelling within storytelling. So obviously in our data, we sometimes encounter patient narratives, which is the patient telling their own story. In the medical discourse world, patients have a very diminished voice. And we have to pull that out, find the patient voice, pull it forward and amplify the themes we see within what's really happening. So within, I have a lot of examples, but I'm gonna just pick one, two. I'll pick two. We recently had a project in a disease state that a lot of people experience as they age. It's not anything that's really unexpected, but, and physicians have gotten really, you know, used to caring for it. There's not a lot of urgency around this condition. Patients might, physicians might assume that patients know what's going on. And what we found in the data is that it was actually quite frightening for patients who were unprepared for it. And many patients were unprepared for it because, you know, you just are carrying on with life. You're not expecting age to bring things along with it all the time. And so we found this big gap where physicians were just like, oh yeah, you just have this. Everyone gets it, you'll be fine. And they send them on their way. Whereas patients are like frightened, they're confused. And one of the tools we use to demonstrate this is telling the story of the patient, of course. And, you know, demonstrating there's not a lot of education happening. They're not prepared. But within that we presented a patient's narrative from within a dialogue where they were actually really confused about something they were experiencing. And actually thought it was a mental health issue and was really concerned that maybe they were going down like an Alzheimer's or dementia route because they just didn't have the education. It was really compelling and frightening that the physicians overall were just very, no big deal, blasé about the condition where patients really were afraid. And so we took time to, we take our findings and then we actually do storytelling last when we develop our reports. We took time to develop the story of like what this patient journey looks like. And then at the right places allowed the patients to speak for themselves and that's really powerful. So I'll just stay there so I don't hog time, but, you know, there's certainly more examples if there's any interest. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I mean, in terms of storytelling, in terms of narrative, that issue of knowledge management is so important. So even that evaluative content like, oh, this was scary to me. This was surprising to me. I find this salient or useful to bring into a story, you know, if I'm a patient, can be really illuminating. So I would imagine that when you take the mess of data and then you organize it this way for clients bringing in the patient voice explicitly at various points that can be really compelling strategically. Get the client to hear it in a way that they might not otherwise hear it. Absolutely. And when you're using storytelling in a strategic way, I mean, it's something you're doing, right? You are the storyteller, right? But you do have to make choices about what story you're telling and, you know, to Alexandra's point why you're telling it. And also, I think to her point earlier too, who's telling it? It's not that compelling if I say, hey, patients are scared. But if you put that audio in there where the patient never says I'm scared. The patient says, I'm like, am I going down the Alzheimer's route? Like you can hear it in the tone. We're all linguists, we know what that might sound like. So there are choices you make strategically as the storyteller as well is how you execute that story. Yeah, such a good point. And there's so much detail that goes into what might be a slide in a deck or ultimately, or a page of a report ultimately. But yeah, it can be subtle for the client to kind of absorb it, but very powerful. Great, and I appreciate that you have more examples in the bag, so let's see where we head. Alex, how about you? I too feel like I could give a thousand examples. I will not. So have more if people want down the line. What I will say is obviously at a very basic level in my job, I am using storytelling as a way to try to make sense of what is often a complicated issue for a general audience. That's the basic underlying thing, right? But what is a little bit more nuanced is sort of how we do that and the choices that we make in doing so. So let me give an example. One thing that we, in my last job, in my current job have thought a lot about trying to do is it's not necessarily my job to change anybody's mind, which is a little bit different than like that is literally your job, Hannah, right? It's like, that's not quite my job, but it is my job to present people with information so that they can make informed decisions and understand the world in a way that lets them make decisions about how to interact with it. So one of the things we've thought a lot about is how do we tell stories in a way that underscores for people what they are hearing and at least makes them question it, at least has them understand that they have power in what they read and hear and think about. So an example would be, I did a fair amount of coverage over the last few years in particular under the Trump presidency about sort of dehumanizing language, in particular when it came to the immigration debate. And again, as a journalist, it's not my job as long as I'm not an opinion journalist to go in and say, this is bad, but instead what I try to do is to do stories where we had experts and we had thoughtful conversations where we highlighted literally when you, there is data, when you use the word animals to refer to a population of human beings, there can be policy consequences. And so here you go audience, I'm gonna make this link for you, you do with it what you will, but I'm gonna show you how powerful language is when it comes to the decisions that are made in this country at a huge federal level, but also at a local one. So that would be, again, I wanna be super clear that my job is it's different than working for clients in that I'm working for a sort of amorphous audience out there that sometimes engages with us and sometimes doesn't, but I want them to have the information about how critical language is in the big, big decisions that get made for us every day, even the ones we have no say in. So that is storytelling for that sort of strategic end is something that I think about a lot. And I think I won't bore people because I some of these, I see names of people that I've had the pleasure of talking to over the last few weeks here and there in office hours and such, but so I won't bore too much, but I will say that similarly I've done similar work around addiction and the opioid crisis and understanding that when you listen to a certain population of people in the language that they use when they talk about it versus people in it, it's a really different thing. And when you look at how policies are written, especially older policies, they use language that is not the language of the people who are in it and understand it, and that matters. So that would be one example of how storytelling is very strategic for me in my goal of informing listeners or readers about what's happening in the world and what they might need to understand about it. Yeah, when you think about the amount of information that we consume, sometimes critically and sometimes not, it's really amazing to think about how these kinds of choices have so many points of impact. So yeah, storytelling is kind of woven through everything that you're doing all day every day. And the strategy in this case is maybe, a little bit different in the sense that your strategy is to have your audience understand an issue and its consequences in a way that they might not be used to or aware of. And this is something that takes time to learn how to craft stories in a way that remains sort of fair. And I could have a whole separate conversation about the idea of journalistic objectivity, which I think is kind of done a little bit, but of staying fair at least and presenting all sides in a way that feels smart and informing, and really gets people the information that they need. You can put all that out there and it won't have an impact just to go back to where we kind of started. If you put that all that out there, actually to connect Leo with a little bit with what you're saying with first person testimony, with all the ground voices, suddenly people are listening differently than if you give them like a white paper. It's a whole different way of communicating this stuff. So yeah. Now, absolutely. Wow, great examples. And Hannah, what are you telling the strategy? So much good stuff here. So I'm gonna try to build and not add any noise, but I think in our work at Ms. Lansky and Partners, storytelling and strategy, they go hand in hand and I don't think you can separate one from the other, but we sort of tell stories on two levels. So the first is the story that we're telling to our client when we are telling them about the solution that we're coming up with. And what we do at a fundamental level is language strategy. So what we're giving to a client typically at the end of the day is a PowerPoint document that we're calling a language strategy and that has a very detailed report on what language to use and what language not to use. And I think what makes us different is that we go into the why based on our research. And that's the second piece of what we do is the actual storytelling of what language to use. And we do that through market research with a ton of different audiences, whether that's with patients, with doctors, with lawyers, tech consumers, bankers, general populations, people who just really like snacks, everybody. And so what we're doing, we kind of have three phases and this is my concrete example is sort of both an overview of what we do and then I'll get into one very specific piece. But we have three phases to the work that we do. So we have a you say phase, a they hear phase and an instead say phase. So our you say phase is all about listening to how language is already being used by our clients. So we wanna ask them about what they think is important about what they do, what they want to change, what they hope to see. And so that helps us understand how something is being talked about today. We take that and we turn that into a lot of different stories or really we use framing, which many people on this line are probably very well familiar with. And we say, what are the different ways that we could talk about this? Like what's an exhaustive list of all of the different ways that we could talk about this and why would that be compelling? So sometimes it's like making that a simple list of like you should enroll in this course because blank and then we'll come up with all of the different discreet ways that you could talk about that. So maybe it's, you know, to you should enroll in this course because you'll succeed professionally. You should enroll in this course for your personal empowerment. You should and coming up with all of the different ways that that might impact somebody. We write those, we write little, what we call speeches and then we test those with audiences and we ask them, you know, from the high level to the very specific, what did you like about this? What is it about this word that you like versus don't like? How could we say this differently? And then, you know, how are you reacting to this? And what we're looking for, like these really foundational insights that help us understand how people think and how that might motivate their behaviors. So one example, we recently were working with a healthcare company on a new treatment for depression. And so we were working with patients with major depressive disorder to understand, you know, how we should talk about just depression overall, like as a disease state. And so one of the pieces of language that we were trying to understand is like, how do people want to feel with their treatment? And so two of the ways we talked about this, one of them is, you know, this can help you feel like yourself again. And then the other way was, this can help you reimagine what your life would look like without depression. And what we found is that there was this complete divide in the way that people heard this based on how they had experienced depression. So people who had been living with major depressive disorder their whole lives, hated hearing feel like yourself again because they felt like, well, that's taking away from who I am. You know, depression is a part of my identity and I don't want to feel like myself again because I am myself, I'm myself today. So they wanted to hear about reimagining, you know, a different life without all of the symptoms that can be damaging versus people who maybe had less severe cases or maybe more episodic cases felt like, yeah, okay, feeling like myself again would be nice. So we take that and then we'll put that into, you know, a report for our client where we say, if you're trying to reach this type of person, this language will resonate versus if you're trying to reach this type of person, this language will resonate. And where the strategy piece comes in is we'll take, we'll go back to those initial interviews from the they say or you say phase and we'll say, all right, this is where you're coming from. This is kind of what we thought might have been the answer but here's actually what we heard and this is why you should say it this way. So we're looking typically for some kind of shift from the way that it's being talked about now, trying to understand why that might not be landing and then figure out what language lands and then we're putting that into the words of the people that we are speaking with. So to try to give that really visual understanding of, not visual but the tangible concrete understanding of, you know, this is how people feel when they react to when they, this is how people feel when they hear this language. So storytelling and strategy very much intertwined and every piece of what we do. So we're looking for the story and then we're also telling the story to our client to make all of that merge and go together. Oh, great examples. I mean, Hannah very vivid and thank you all for providing such really tangible examples of the different ways in which you kind of do this work in your current roles. And I wanna switch gears a little bit. In terms of, you know, everything that you three have said and if we think about the folks on this call today, I think we all can so identify with how your skills as linguists are valuable in this work. I think that we're all kind of feeling that. And so my question to you is, you know, and forgive me if I am framing your work in a way that you object to, if you do, please correct me. But, you know, Alex, you're working in journalism which, you know, of course is a field that we also recognize. Leah, you're working in kind of, you know, insights and market research. And so that is its own kind of field in a way and certainly separate from, you know, pharmaceutical companies or healthcare more broadly. And Hannah, I mean, perhaps as a language strategist, your training is so obviously salient. But at the same time, there are certainly, I'm sure moments of competition with PR or communications imagined differently from language or linguistics. So with that in mind, what I'm wondering is, how do you make these skills salient and understandable and valuable to these other fields that you collaborate with or that your work intersects with? So how do you make these skills important and necessary and relevant? And maybe we can start with you, Alex. Yeah, I mean, and there are a couple of ways to answer this. One would be in the sort of the job hunt, you know, front. And I'm happy to talk about that more because I do think that the way you choose to frame your linguistic background when you enter a job hunt is so critical to where you end up, right? So I just to go down that road for really quickly, I think that going in when I decided that journalism, audio journalism in particular seemed like it was going to have a lot of what I cared about and loved in my own work but that it was gonna be a slightly, you know, quite new direction. I did think a lot, luckily with the help of people at Georgetown at the time and then over the years I followed, I thought a lot about how to talk very plainly about my skills. And I will say, you know, it's probably, I'll be interested to hear what Leah and Hannah say about this, for me, it's probably a little bit different in that, you know, I'm not often, I mean, it's sometimes, but I'm not often talking about like, you know, interactional sociolinguists. I'm not talking about like discourse analysis. I'm not using those words. I'm more likely to say I have an extraordinary ear for what's happening in a conversation. And as I mentioned before, what's not being said and what's happening in the background, what, how the context is affecting this conversation. I am excellent at looking at a huge amount of data and finding the patterns within it and presenting why that is important, creating a story. So these are all things that you can easily link to, you know, sociolinguistic frameworks, but when I'm talking about them to a potential or current employer, that's how I'm talking about it. As a real person who's not in academia because that is what people understand. Certainly I've been lucky to work at places where I will hear, tell me, tell me more. Oh my God, you know, you studied with this person and actually the, I feel like the medical communication side, which I don't know as much about, but that the doctor-patient communication stuff, people are so fascinated. And I only did a tiny bit of that work, but that's an example of, you know, people really wanna hear about it and hear about how you might apply that to your day to day. But when it comes down to it, I have done a great deal of work over the last like decade translating my skills into plain language. And I've done some of that here in how I've explained what I do. But like I said, many of the sort of basic concepts that we all know, as you said, Hannah, framing is a very good example. I am employing all the time. What I would say is that it's worthwhile for those who are thinking about, I assume many of you are, where to go next in your career. It's worth thinking about calling that out, even if you're not using the precise language. So when I talk about epistemics, when I talk about that with my employer, I'm talking about, there's something really interesting going on here in how these people are expressing to one another in this press conference, this big, overly covered press conference where everybody's just talking about the politics of it. But look at the way that they're managing what they know. Look at the way that they're talking about what they understand and don't. And then suddenly, they're looking to me as an expert in this. And I don't have to talk about it using the precise language that I did, that I was very lucky to learn and think throughout Georgetown. So does that kind of answer your question? I kind of went with one sort of specific road. No, I appreciate that. And I especially appreciate, and maybe some other folks on this call do too, the examples of how you do that translation. So what that actually sounds like, because I think that that is sometimes really challenging. Like we know that we can't say things like interactional socio-linguistics, but how do we talk about that? And so those examples are really helpful. You know, and before we move on, we do have a question about corpus work. So, you know, in terms of working with corpora, is it ever called something different or how do you talk about it? Would any of you have a particular response to that that you wanna share? Yeah, I would just kind of tag on to Alexandra's answer. I think it really is about finding the patterns in large amounts of language data. And then I think the key piece of that is being able to speak to why it matters, right? I think with corpus analysis, what you're able to do is say, well, look, here are these, like even with something as simple as a frequency analysis, you can say these are the top 10 most frequent words that appear, what does that tell me? I think that means that this issue is top of mind. Let's see what else is being used alongside that word. And then you get insights into the themes. And then from there, you can dig even deeper. So it helps you have a more impactful qualitative analysis because you're able to have more confidence in the insights that you pull out. So I think being able to really tie the, you know, what you're doing to why it matters and why it matters for the industry or wherever you're working is really, really key. And I think that is a skill that is definitely sought after. It's something that we do just to answer the other piece of that is where it comes up in our industry. Well, for us that will happen in like a media analysis, we'll sometimes do published media analysis. We recently just did a like text landscape analysis of a bunch of different branded and unbranded and advocacy sites on the topic of postpartum depression. And so we used corpus analysis to first say, all right, here are the key themes that are popping up here. And then here's what that means. And then here are opportunities for you to stand out based on those. So taking it from the high level, you know, what are the trends and then translating that into here's how it's actionable is very valuable and definitely sought after. Thanks so much, Ken. Yeah, oh, Leah, your views on corpora will be additionally very relevant here, yes. Yeah, I'm just gonna piggyback a little bit. All the same, I agree with those statements. I would say that clients and industry and other industries outside of linguistics may have a sense or some assumptions about corpus work and also concordance. Lots of clients ask for concordance and lexical work. We absolutely can do that, we will, but we need to tell them why it matters when we might wanna do a comparative corpus analysis or multiple comparative analytics to across multiple data sets to reveal some interesting themes from different groups, right? So all of it's really relevant. It's really cool to do corpus work in these spaces, but we also have to approach our clients or our audience or listeners with our own assumptions about what they might think it means. We have to define it ourselves to create boundaries around it. And the other thing I would say is really cool that we do with corpus work that you might be interested in doing in your careers. As we do build concept structures in universes based on some of our comparative corpus work and we leverage those over time, they're dynamic. It's really cool and interesting. And when you sit inside one niche industry like me working with just medical data and people talking to doctors, you can see the growth and the change and from those concept structures you make from the corpus work. And so it's really compelling. And to finish that, to take it to the end, clients love it, right? Like when I go to them and say, hey, we can demonstrate a concept shift from language from 2015 to 2021, they're just bonkers over that stuff, right? So it's really relevant. It's relevant, it's important work. And you can put that right into your storytelling because it's a part of the story, right? Why did it shift? Where's the shift coming from? What are these pressures? You bring it all together. And Leo, just to follow up super quick here. When you say concept structures, what do you mean? Sure, so actually, we saw some metaphor questions, cancer versus as a journey versus cancer as war. So we can take the highly keyed phrases structures. We can create, what we can do is limitize a concept, right? So you pull together all these things that seem to match in a concept or like a little universe and you test it. Is this statistically relevant in your data? Actually, we use some computational linguistics to pull forward what is statistically relevant and that informs how we build some of those universes. And that's what I mean. No, thank you so much. Metaphor in the bigger concept sense. Interesting, and I think it is so true that if you're doing corpus analysis, I mean, you can't do that without defining the corpus. So if you're doing a media content analysis, you can't just do an analysis of media. You have to decide what that means. What are the outlets that you're bringing into your corpus? What's the timeframe? How large is your sample? You can't just get a dump truck full of data and back it up and analyze it. And you might have other types of corpora. Like, you might create a corpus of 22-hour-long interviews and that corpus is going to look different from 115-minute interviews. You might have a corpus of open-ended survey text responses that you're working with. So yeah, I think that if you do this kind of work and you're interested in talking about it with a future employer, doing whatever you can to kind of flesh out exactly what that means in your work will always be helpful. And so I wanna get back to this question of, how we make our way as linguists in fields that might intersect with other fields or might find homes in other fields like journalism. So Hannah, how about you? How do you think about that in your work with clients? How linguistics fits in with other fields? Yeah, and it might be a matter of, and forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing. But it might be a matter of, say, convincing clients that this particular approach or these particular insights are what is needed over maybe some other shiny object that they are interested in. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a good question. We think about this truly all the time. I think the first piece of it is that linguistics can be a hook. And oftentimes clients like the sound of it but don't necessarily know what it means, which gives you an opportunity to define it and then find the definition that most applies to the challenge that your client is trying to solve. And I think at the heart of it, it does go back to that matter of, you can have the perfect strategy. You can have the perfect idea for your business, but unless you have the language that is going to connect with people emotionally, it won't land. People won't remember you. What you're trying to get across isn't going to land. So being able to come in as linguists who really specialize in knowing how language directly influences behavior and directly influences perceptions and having people who can come in and say, this is exactly what you should say and here's why. If you say it this way, people are going to hear it this way. If you say it this way, people are going to react this way. And so I think it's that real specialization piece that sets us apart from something like PR where you certainly have people who are amazing at language and at writing and all of these things, but we're coming in and we're saying, all right, we understand behavioral science, we understand linguistics and the intersection of those things in a way that is beneficial for your business, for your marketing strategy, for this new campaign that you want to put out. So I think linguistics is our edge throughout and being able to define that and also apply it in different ways depending on what client we're working with is very valuable in our view. But does that answer your question? Cause I feel like I can speak to it in different fields as well, but that's from a high level, kind of how we think about it. Yeah, no, that's helpful. I mean, I think, as I understand like Hannah in your case and Leah in your case, you know, the organizations that you work for are looking for linguists, like they will ask for that training, which is rare, which is rare, but that doesn't mean that it's always smooth sailing because you're working with people who are kind of maybe not quite there. So the question that we might be facing isn't necessarily getting the job with the organization, but how do you continue to, especially as you get into client management roles, how do you kind of make your training salient? So Hannah, that was very helpful. And Leah, how do you look at this question? Like when you're faced with folks who are more used to market research in that traditional sense. So you're right. I mean, in the industry, I mean people look for linguists. They will say get the linguists on the line. Excuse me, they'll say get the linguists on the line, which we love, right? Feels great, but oftentimes same with corpus linguistics. They're coming with assumptions, right? A lot of times we are explaining that what we do is more valuable than word lists, right? And then basic lexical work. So when we get engaged in conversations where we really want to demonstrate our value, we start actually telling the story of the value of pulling apart and going deep, diving deep into what do the communication means? What communication can tell us as a behavior? And so we really talk about language as a choice and language behavior, language performance as a behavior. And when we're able to start demonstrating that market researchers really, they understand it, because they understand behavior, right? That's where their interest is. But I would say that the biggest hurdle in demonstrating value is going up the wall, going up to the wall of assumption that we just speak a lot of languages and talk about words, which is not what we do. But to get over that barrier, we do talk about language as a choice. We talk about language as a behavior and we talk about engagement. So we use the word engagement a lot, attention, engagement and focus. We talk about how we can identify where patients are engaging, where their attention is based on their language behaviors. We talk about how we can understand more about how a physician feels about a certain brand based on how they position it as compared to how they might position something else or talk about treatment in general. So when we start really talking about language as a behavior and giving them some real examples of what we can do with that, we're doing pretty good. That's interesting. So it sounds like, I mean, that's a lot of helpful information. And one even small piece that I took from it is that you've found a way to plug in. So if you're talking to people on a brand team who are maybe market researchers by training, plugging in with a term like behavior and then connecting that to linguistic analysis can be helpful like building that bridge between how they talk, what they know, what they do and your work. And I think that what all of you seem to have in common as well is again, going back to that focus on the mess and how, oh, you might like this framing for your new product, but what we're hearing is that people don't see it that way. Or Leah, we want to believe that an interaction between a doctor and patient goes like this, but actually we're seeing it happen like this. And Alex certainly in terms of like who's telling the story, how they're telling the story and which stories are highlighted on a national stage is so important. So I'd like to ask you for some advice that you have for the folks here today and those listening in the future in terms of being a linguist, doing storytelling, using it strategically, what do you think is so important for people to know? And this might be something about getting your foot in the door or networking. It might be about, Hannah, as you've mentioned, developing your own professional story, your professional narrative, using those skills to help you in that way. Or building yourself as a linguist within a field that is often called something else like journalism. So yeah, what advice do you have for folks? And this is a very open question. So take it however you'd like. Let's start with you, Leah. Of course, so I'm gonna start with advice that's very general. It's not specific, well, I'm gonna start with some guiding advice, actually. One of the things that may help you quite a bit is as you leave the academy. In academy, you're just really focused on findings, observations and sharing knowledge, but in private industry, especially you have to apply it and make recommendations. You have to actually have some very real strategic outcomes that people can take action on when you're in private industry. And that is something of a gap, I think, in academia. We don't practice that a lot before we leave. So my advice is apply, apply, apply. So start practicing applying your knowledge. If you have a question or something in your own research or just like you're observing the world around you, start practicing applying, okay, what would I do? How would I recommend a change here? How would I recommend an opportunity to be taken in this space? Because that is a huge part of the job. And it can be very challenging to have all of this data and to have an entire report. And then you say, so now what? Now what do I do? So what about this data? You have to be able to take action. So recommending the next steps is the hardest part of applied linguistics right out of academy. So that's my first statement. And I say that because it's so fundamental and critical to storytelling. We're all using storytelling as a strategy. And in order to tell a complete story in the private industry world, you have to have that applied next step prepared, ready to go. You have to actually know what that is to be able to craft your story in the way that you can walk your client right through that story and reveal the findings to them and then end with action steps that make sense based on your insights you've just shared. So really cultivating that sense of how am I gonna deal with the knowledge I've just gained? How am I gonna use this to do something? And then my next piece of application advice is apply. You're not all of the skillsets you've developed in linguistics apply them to other industries. How will I just as a thought experiment how will I use this in marketing? How will I use this in advertising? You've got some really great examples here with Hannah, Alex and Marissa does a lot of cool work too. So just think about that as a thought experience on your own time. You're like, how will I use this in other spaces because we know linguistics is everywhere. And finally my last bit of advice is just apply to jobs, like apply, get the practice, go on interviews, save the practice saying these things to folks. Just apply, apply, apply, that's my advice. Can I just piggyback off of that just cause what I was gonna say really goes nicely from what Leo was gonna say. Do you mind? I love it when that happens. Okay, great. I was gonna say that the application advice that your second point is very much what I was gonna say essentially what I hope people take away at least in part from this for when it comes to sort of my experience and what I feel like I've learned. There are so many jobs that you as a linguist are qualified for that you can do and bring specific skills to, but you have to actually do the work to find those and you have to do the, like you're not gonna, like I've never been a journalist with none of the job listings have said linguist in them or we would love a linguistics background, not one, right? However, when I have gone and just said, you know what, I am gonna think about and that honestly me often just like lists, just like lists, here are all the ways that I'm gonna be able to say I as a linguist I'm gonna be the best person for this job. I have to bring that in. So if you are interested in a really a broad sort of possible world of things you can do that really does go beyond a place where linguists are actively sought after, so possible you can do that, but you need to actually bring that extra step of deciding I'm gonna show someone else the ways that I am so, I'm different and even better than someone else for this particular job. So that could mean, I mean, honestly that could mean something so dramatically different than anything that we're even talking about here. I mean, actually I once used my linguistics background in a job interview to get one of my recent LA teaching jobs, I kid you not, having to do with management of information. But that's, you know, I'm talking obviously not quite that out of crazy left field, but my point is think about things that are interesting to you and if you are willing and not everyone is willing to do this if you are willing to be the person that has to hold on to linguists as your job title without it being in your job title because that's what I have to do, right? I actively think I do panels like this, I talk to amazing people like all of you, I think about the ways that being a linguist helps me be a journalist, but I have to do that work. My organization is not doing that work for me but you can also do that work and you will be appreciated for it in many different organizations and fields but you need to do that step if that makes sense. And you will find I have found a lot of people I know have ended up going into, I mean, several journalists that I know have gone from linguistics to journalism and have had to just do that work. So I know that I'm a linguist but I have to do that continued work for myself which is maybe more upkeep than someone who is doing this stuff actively every day, you know? So that's why I try to stay really connected to the community so that everything that I've learned that makes me, I think, I hope a better journalist is getting cultivated, is growing, isn't just kind of dying because that can happen. You know, people get master's degrees in something, they do something else and but luckily, linguistics is such a valuable skills, I mean, whatever piece of it you own can be so valuable in so many different ways I just have to keep doing that cultivation work. Does that make, I hope that makes sense. Yeah, and I think one thing that I hear from both of you is that, you know, there's so much work involved in understanding the field or organization that you're joining. So yeah, as you said, Alex, you have to do the work to kind of make those connections understand where your colleagues are at. So, and with Leah, perhaps like, it takes a while to really understand the types of recommendations that are what the client needs compared to what you might initially think is interesting or important as a linguist. You really have to understand, you have to empathize, essentially, and that will get you really far. And Hannah, how about you? Yeah, great stuff here. Again, I think, so two things I wanna echo, I wanna piggyback off of what Leah was talking about about actionability and then speak to Alexander's point about doing the work and get into that more on a tactical piece. But in terms of actionability, I think that is pretty much everything when you go outside of academia, right? I think us as academic linguists, we are so good at finding the patterns in things. We are so good at pointing out what's going on in an interaction and figuring out what theories might apply. And it's exciting and fun and cool to do that. But I think in order to make that valuable outside of academia, you have to ask yourself, so what every single time? Okay, this is what we're seeing, but so what? And then what do we do about it? So personally, every time I'm making a slide and a PowerPoint deck, I'll kind of take one point from what we're seeing and all of those disparate data points. And then I'll say, okay, but why? Why does my client need to know this? Why is this important to them? Why should they even send the 30 seconds reading it? So getting to that, so what pieces is critical and something I've had to retrain my brain to do and really learn outside of the academia space? In terms of the job search process and really marketing your skills, I love everything that Alexander already spoke to in terms of finding that space for yourself. And I think one thing that you can do on a tactical level is create your own story from the language data that you have. If you have a job description and you're seeing these are the things that they're looking for, how do you turn that into your narrative about your strengths or the inverse of that? Say you have a list of your qualifications based on your resume, how can you turn those into a story that ladders up to what the organization is looking for? So it's just from a more tactical level. Like we totally have those skills as linguists and as storytellers to say, here's all the pieces of that puzzle. Now, how do I craft that into my professional narrative? So yeah, not so much as the big picture, but on the, you know, you're gonna go do this tomorrow. That's one exercise you could do. But yeah, I think that's all I had to add there. That is so helpful, thank you. And I do see a question in the chat, which I think we can answer really quickly. Are all of you the only linguists in your job or is it common to have multiple linguists on your team? Can all of you just, if we run right through, speak to that starting with Hannah? Yeah, we have probably like five or six people out of a 60 person company that are trained as linguists. So I think we do the work even within our company to educate people on what linguistics is and why it matters. Great, thank you, and Leah. My whole team is native linguists or communication scientists. And that's strategic. So, but it's very rare. It's incredibly rare. Very true. Alex? I am the only linguist on my team that I run, the editorial team that I run for the show that I am the senior producer for. There are other linguists who have become journalists at Axios at large. So maybe not necessarily an audio journalism, but yes, they do exist. There are only a couple of them though. I'm definitely a minority. I do wanna piggyback quickly Marisa in a former role I had translating like complicated federal law into something human resources could use to apply, right? Like I was the only linguist on that team with lawyers and human resource people and a publisher. And they were like, when I left, they're like, well, we're only gonna hire a linguist from now on because you knew exactly what needed, how that translation worked, right? So don't let it like intimidate you if somebody doesn't know what it is or they've never encountered a linguist before. Once you start working, they'll see the value. It'll be clear. That is a very hopeful note, but one that I also subscribe to, yes, absolutely. And yeah, I want to echo also what Hannah said about the so what. Really, that's such an important skill to develop. And as Leah said, that's something that you can practice. So if you're in classes and you're writing papers, even if your professor doesn't ask you for that kind of reflection, you can still do it. You can still practice it. You might not know exactly where or how you want to apply it, but you can imagine some possibilities and just work on building that muscle. And also, as we've seen here today, certainly storytelling can mean so much. And none of you has mentioned like a LeBovian abstract Coda classification as particularly relevant. And so again, you've just so richly demonstrated how flexible and dynamic and creative you can be bringing in all kinds of concepts, stories, journeys, framings on so many levels. And these are all things that we are trained to do. So I really thank you again for your time today and have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you all. Thanks everyone.