Conference paper woes

[ossamenta]

A few days ago I was linked to a post on academic conference etiquette, which in turn linked to a post on conference rules. I thought they could be very useful, since this will be my first talk at a "proper" conference. Some things were obvious, such as practice your talk beforehand and don't overrun your time slot. Although I got a bit worried when they said that a 20 minute talk (check) would equal 10-12 full A4 pages. I have three... Admittedly, both pages seem to run under the assumption that you will write your talk and then read what you've written - something I'm not so keen on, as it doesn't captivate the audience, especially if it's a topic they're not very interested in. The better talks I've heard have been people using notes and keywords rather than a full text, which is the method I'm planning to use. I haven't "read" it out loud yet, hopefully tomorrow when I've got most of the images for the powerpoint set up. I've got the slot just before lunch, so I figure that if I'm a couple of minutes short people will probably not mind too much. But I better not end up with a five minute talk and twenty minutes for questions!

I still can't find some images I want to use. Department of "I know I have seen such an image somewhere (during the 17 years I've studied archaeology)" is not very helpful.

Comments

[holyschist]

Admittedly, both pages seem to run under the assumption that you will write your talk and then read what you've written

I have noticed that this seems to be really common in history- and humanities-related fields, and really rare in science. I am with you that the better talks are not read.

The method I use is 1 slide per minute, leave 5 minutes for questions. So at the conferences I've pretended at, for a fifteen minute slot I'd have ~10 slides, and if I ran over ten minutes a little and only left 3 for questions, I did not feel very bad about it. I make notecards with prompts on them, but rarely actually look at them when actually presenting. The slide:minute ratio will of course vary--data-heavy slides take longer to discuss, background slides or "look at these pretty picture" slides are faster. So if you have more of one kind than the other, that definitely changes the ratio.