I watched this newly released video from TED today. I enjoyed the talk. It was interesting to see how she was able to communicate science in a way that was accessible to a broader audience. One of the reasons she was successful was because she used lots of analogies that the audience already understood. And in fact, she chose interesting analogies that often even got a laugh from the audience. Another things she did well was to use many internal summaries or reviews to emphasize her key points and she was good at talking about the science in story form. Finally, she did a nice job of acknowledging her team that helped to make the discovers that she spoke about.

Even thought this is not a science talk for a science audience, still you can use the same principles to make all talks effective.