Someone at a conference dinner, a funder's reception or a family gathering asks what your research is about. You start with the background, reach the method, notice their eyes drift, and never get to the finding.
The fix is not to talk faster. It is to decide in advance what one minute can carry, and to write it down once so you can say it, print it and film it.
Why 60 Seconds Is the Right Target
Most of the moments that matter are short: a hallway at a conference, the start of a poster session, a vertical video someone sees on their phone. If you can explain the work in a minute, you can always stretch it. Going the other way is much harder.
The Three Minute Thesis competition, developed by the University of Queensland, asks doctoral candidates to explain their research in three minutes, in language suited to a non-specialist audience. Its competitor guide gives advice that works just as well at one minute: avoid jargon, know what you want the audience to take away, and imagine you are explaining the work to a friend from another field. One minute simply forces you to make those choices harder.
The Five-Part Structure
This is the structure. The timings are a guide for a one-minute version, not a rule.
| Part | Rough time | Its job | Ask yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Hook | 10 seconds | Start from something the listener already knows or cares about | What everyday problem does this touch? |
| 2. Question | 10 seconds | Say what you wanted to find out | What did nobody know before you started? |
| 3. What you did | 10 seconds | One sentence on how, no technique names | How would I describe it to a 14-year-old? |
| 4. Finding | 15 seconds | The one result worth remembering | If they remember one sentence, which one? |
| 5. Why it matters | 15 seconds | Who it helps, or what changes next | Why should this person care? |
The finding and the reason it matters get the most time because they are what people repeat to someone else. The method gets the least because it is the part only specialists can judge.
A Worked Example
Say you have a psychology paper on how short daily walks affect sleep in university students. The study and its numbers below are invented for illustration.
Hook: Most students know the feeling of lying awake before an exam with a mind that will not switch off.
Question: We wanted to know whether something as simple as a daily walk could help them fall asleep faster.
What we did: For four weeks, half of our volunteers took a 20-minute walk every afternoon and half kept their normal routine, and everyone wore a sleep tracker.
Finding: The walkers fell asleep about ten minutes faster on average, and the difference was biggest in the weeks before exams.
Why it matters: That is a free change any student can try, and it gives universities a cheap thing to encourage during exam season. We studied one campus, so the next step is to test it more widely.
Notice what is missing: the scale used to measure sleep, the statistical model, the previous studies. All of that belongs in the paper. In one minute, one honest limitation is enough.
Cut It to Fit
Write the script, then read it aloud with a timer at the pace you would really use with a stranger. The 3MT competitor guide suggests reading your talk aloud, asking for feedback, and recording yourself to hear where you pause or speak too quickly. That works here too.
If you run over, cut in this order:
- Any second finding. Save it for the follow-up question.
- Qualifiers inside the method sentence ("using a modified version of").
- Words that only your field uses. Replace each with the plain word, or drop the idea.
- Background before the hook. Start with the hook itself.
Do not cut the hook or the reason it matters. Those are the parts a non-specialist remembers.
Out Loud, on a Poster, as a Short
Once the script exists, it has three lives.
Out loud
Learn the shape, not the words. If you remember the five parts, you can adapt the hook to whoever is in front of you (a clinician, a policy adviser, your aunt) and still land the same finding. Stop after "why it matters" and let them ask a question. A conversation is better than a finished speech.
On a poster
Use the finding as the poster's headline, in large type, and the "why it matters" sentence directly under it. Someone walking past should get the point in the time it takes to read two lines. The method and figures sit below for the people who stop. When they do, your one-minute script is your opening line.
As a vertical short
The same script, read in about a minute, becomes a vertical video. At the time of writing (October 2026), YouTube's Shorts help page says its Shorts creation tools make videos up to 3 minutes long, and LinkedIn's video requirements accept videos from 3 seconds (on desktop) up to 15 minutes. LinkedIn also advises keeping key elements, text and logos away from the edges of the frame so its interface does not cover them.
Add captions. YouTube's captions help page notes that subtitles and captions let you reach a larger audience, including deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers and viewers who speak another language. Your script is already the caption text. For a longer format, our guide to making a video abstract covers the three-minute version.
Common Mistakes
- Starting with the field. "My research is in computational neuroscience" tells the listener nothing they can hold on to. Start with the hook.
- Explaining the method in detail. It feels like proof of rigour. To a listener it is a delay before the point.
- Stacking findings. Three results in a minute means none of them is remembered.
- Overclaiming. "We proved" and "this will cure" travel fast and are hard to take back. Say what you found and where it applies.
- No ending. Close on why it matters, then stop. Trailing off with "so, yeah" undoes the work.
Doing the Short Without a Camera
If filming yourself is the step you keep putting off, Amplify makes a 45 to 60 second vertical short (9:16) from your paper, for LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and conference screens, along with a video abstract of about 3 minutes, an audio brief and a one-page infographic.
Everything is generated from the PDF you upload and nothing else, and each piece carries the title, the authors and a link back to the paper of record. Each format arrives as three variants you can edit line by line, so you can make the wording match the script you already practised. A person reviews every format before it is released, and nothing publishes until you approve it.
One Minute, Many Rooms
A good one-minute explanation is the most reusable thing you can write about a paper. It opens conversations at conferences, headlines your poster, becomes a short video and gives journalists and press officers the sentence they need. Write it once, test it out loud, and keep it ready for the next time someone asks.
