Read this student reflection and edit it .

Last week's lecture presented the idea that science is the most powerful form of evidence. My position as a student studying both physics and law makes this an important issue for me, and I was thinking about it while watching the 'The New Inventors' television program last Tuesday. The two 'inventors' (an odd name considering that, as Smith (2002) says, nobody thinks of things in a vacuum) were accompanied by their marketing people. The conversations were quite contrived, but also funny and enlightening. I realized that the marketing people used a certain form of evidence to persuade the viewers of the value of the inventions. To them, this value was determined solely by whether something could be bought or soldin other words, whether something was 'marketable'. In contrast, the inventors seemed quite shy and reluctant to use anything more than technical language, almost as if this was the only evidence required as if no further explanation was needed.

This difference forced me to reflect on the aims of this coursehow communication skills are not generic but differ according to time and place. Like in the 'Research Methodology' textbook discussed in the first lecture, these communication skills are the result of a form of triangulation, which I have made into a diagram of my own.