Medical presentations can be designed as a data dump or as a story. One effective communication strategy is to organize a lecture as a three act play, starting with previews as the first act and ending with reviews as the third act. Previews facilitate learner achievement and may help learners view a medical instructor more positively. Reviews also help consolidate audience learning and ensure that messages have been clearly delivered and received. The main act is in the middle and is the content itself. Delivering this content in small multiples gives learners manageable packets of information and can help them to see the differences and similarities between conditions, deepening their understanding of what was presented.

Applying principles of adult learning can enhance the effectiveness of a medical presentation. A previous “Trends in Psychopharmacology” presented an overview of these principles and discussed targeting the learner rather than the content or the lecturer as the focus for a medical presentation. Here we cover the concept of presenting content to a learner as a story and show how to organize or “storyboard” it as a three act play.

Lectures can be arranged as a dull recitation of facts or as a story that makes the facts come alive. Generally speaking, a participant is less interested in hearing the facts that a lecturer has to present than in listening to a story the lecturer has to tell. Organizing content into a “three act play” can make a lecture memorable and its lessons practical. Classically, teachers have explained the three parts as: “Say what you are gonna say; say it; then say what you said.” More specifically, the previews are the first part, the presentation itself is the second part, and the reviews are the third part of this structure.