When I went to my first
discipline-based conference, as a grad student, it was not to give a
paper. The event consisted of
lectures by tenured senior academics.
Most of the crowd had come simply to listen. But that was changing, and
the democratic virus has been spreading ever since.
Now it is common for graduate
students, and compulsory for junior academics, to offer conference papers. It's the obvious way to learn this genre; and as those ghastly career workshops explain,
it is an easy way to build your c.v.
(‘C.v.’ now means a resumé of your career. The Latin phrase curriculum vitae means the course of
your life. Let’s hope we can still
detect the difference.)
There are traps in this
business. Here are three bad ways
to give a paper: 1. Writing a journal article and trying to read it out in a
conference. In a 10 or 15 minute slot you cannot
read a journal article aloud. 2. Trying to show off. Often signalled by an
over-clever title: ‘Queer(y)ing Hamlet: The Anti-Hero in/beyond the
Anthropocene’. (I blush to admit that I called one of my early papers ‘Symbolic
logic as an axiomatic-analogue model in the analysis of children's thinking
about politics and large-scale social organization’. In six words: ‘Formal
models for children’s social thought’.). 3. Speaking to a clique. Some papers
are little more than academic faction-fighting in camouflage. You can detect
them by the in-house jargon, snide put-downs, and good-guys-vs-bad-guys
melodrama.
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| The well prepared speaker arrives at the session |
Avoiding these traps, how
can we do the job well? Here is my never-fail recipe, distilled from a thousand
cups of evil conference coffee with a few toads and bats stirred in:
1. Be Well Prepared. This is about 80%
of the task. It doesn’t mean you have to agonize over every word, or solve the
Problem of the Universe. It does mean you should think, not only about the
content of your report, but also about the way
you will report.
The key issue is
to think about your audience. You are trying to get in direct touch with them,
and the formality of the conference format creates distance (see picture below).
Remember that the session is actually more about the audience than about you. The size of the crowd doesn’t matter. I have
given a paper to an audience totalling seven, including the three other presenters
and the chairperson, and we had a good discussion. Respect what the audience
know already. (In Sociology conferences, please
don’t recite that sentence from The 18th
Brumaire, everyone has read it long ago!) Consider what will be new and
relevant to them, and focus on that.
2. Think about the genre. This is oral
communication. When I am giving a conference paper I speak from a maximum of one page of brief bold notes. They are
essentially the headlines. By having no more than this, I can talk with the people in the room and not past
them.
If you need to write out a
full text, that’s OK: but write it as
speech. If you don’t know how to do that, look at a play by Bernard Shaw or
Bertolt Brecht, who wrote about ideas as drama.
It’s fine to spice your talk
with a few images and a bit of text – once I used overhead projector slides,
now I use PowerPoint. But do this very simply, very briefly, so the technology
doesn’t mask your message. For Heaven’s sake, don’t turn around and read lumps of text off a PowerPoint slide on
the big screen. Apart from the alarming crick in your neck, this completely
breaks your connection with the people in the room.
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| The formality of the format creates distance |
3. Plan sequence & time. You are
likely to have 10 minutes in an ordinary conference session. Don’t run over the
allocated time: that is unfair to other participants, and people will not
respect you for it.
So use your golden minutes
well! Cast your survey-of-the-literature into the Everlasting Bonfire, there is
no time for that. Go straight to the nub of the problem. A good rule is to
state your most important idea within the first four minutes. Don’t leave this
to the end, because it is easy to mis-judge the time while speaking, and you
may not reach it. Which would be a pity, after coming all this way...
The order of material in a
conference paper is different from a journal article or a dissertation – it’s a
different situation. Here is a template that will often work (you can check the
timing by rehearsing with a friend):
(a)
Problem, 2 minutes: Explain very crisply
the question you are wrestling with.
(b)
Main finding, 1 minute 30 seconds. In
a conference presentation, this can legitimately come before method and data.
(c)
Reasoning, 30 seconds + 4 minutes 30
seconds. Say ‘How did I come to this conclusion?’ By doing such-and-such
(Method, very very very short); and here is what I found (Materials, in a bit more
detail). Give a slice of your raw
material, which really helps the audience to understand. It will be a thin
slice, but that’s OK, in a conference you are really offering a sample of your work.
(d)
Relevance, 2 minutes. Tell the
significance of what you have done. If it does suggest something about the
literature, say so here at the end: ‘Finally, as you will realize, this finding
overthrows both Keynes’ model of effective demand and Einstein’s general theory
of relativity’. Whoops, we are 30 seconds over the time limit, will have to
trim something.
4. When you have the floor, use it with
confidence. You are, after all, the person in the room (perhaps in the
world!) who knows most about this problem. You have some news worth telling.
And you have an intelligent audience, proved by the fact that they have shown
up at your session. Invite them into the discussion, and you will have done
well.
The story goes that an
Anglican bishop was asked by a young minister ‘How should I preach?’, to which
the bishop replied: ‘Preach about God and preach about 20 minutes.’ In the
conference you have just 10 minutes to preach, so belt it out!
In doing that, be of good heart, and show your
feelings. This is a communication between people, not between robots. Tears and
laughs are allowed in academic conferences. You may not be Charlie Chaplin, but
every human touch will help.
