Educational efforts to promote effective oral science communication at the undergraduate level tend to reinforce strategies related to impression management. Students are taught tactics that can be used to create the impression of competent science communication without reflectively considering epistemological beliefs. Deeper aspects of oral science communication, including underlying epistemic functions, are overlooked. In this article, we examine an undergraduate biology course that includes student reflection about the nature of science communication. Rather than treating science communication as a task of impression management, we prompted students to reflect on their views of science communication. Our findings show that students' oral performances while they give presentations aligned with their personal views of what it means to communicate scientifically. Viewing science communication primarily as a verbal craft (i.e., an activity with a specialized verbal design) encouraged students to make effective use of verbal strategies during presentations. By contrast, students' tendency to overlook visual communication in scientific exchanges led to visual performances in need of improvement. Our findings highlight the need for instructional approaches that offer students opportunities to engage in reflective discussions about what it means to communicate scientifically.