How to prepare and present a conference presentation

October 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

Two of my last three weekends were dedicated to that time-honored grad-student rite of passage, the academic conference. Reflecting on my own performances as well as those of my colleagues, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the conference presentation. I hope that my fellow cacophoners might share and amend these guidelines I humbly offer. In the spirit of the efficiency celebrated by conference presentations themselves, I will organize these ideas in outlined bulleted form. I work within the social sciences, but I believe much of what I share here may be of use to you  budding humanists and natural scientists, too. Here goes:

Find a suitable conference

  • Sign up for email listservs for subfields and organizations you are interested in. Throughout the year you will get call-for-paper announcements (CFP) offering panel discussions to be a part of. Pay attention to the deadline and guidelines for CFPs. Read their panel description closely. Often they will have a certain rubric within which they are working, with a theoretical approach either tacitly or explicitly signalled.
  • There are many regional and graduate-student conferences organized for people still early in their careers. If you are at the dissertation proposal stage or still formulating your project, these kinds of events are a good idea. The grad student conference I attended in Boulder, Colorado, included very helpful workshop sessions on writing and theoretical approaches to the conference theme (“states of belonging”).
  • Many conferences also accept individual papers. You submit your abstract and they will place you with other “orphan” presenters. You run a greater risk of not getting your paper accepted or getting stuck in a hodpodge potpourri panel (like I was last weekend) if you opt for this approach.

Write a strong abstract

  • Most conferences want you to participate (and want your conference fees payment), but they do have limits and criteria for accepting papers. A compelling abstract is critical. Often this is an awkward exercise because  you have not written the paper for which you must make a synopsis.
  • You usually have 200-300 words to work with (the conference I attended last weekend confined me to only 100!), so you don’t have space to elaborate sophisticated concepts, nor to tell everything about your project. Use keywords that signal a certain literature that, after studying the CFP, you know the organizers will be attuned to.
  • Allude to a piece of research you have conducted or a fieldsite/event/documentary source that will serve as the material your paper examines.
  • HAVE A POINT your paper will advance. Even if you don’t yet know what that point is, make a concise and intelligible claim. Emphasize the innovative. The abstract doesn’t have to break new ground; it need only suggest your paper might do so.

Write the paper

  • The organizers will often want you to submit the paper for a discussant to read before the conference and prepare comments. Do NOT send a whole dissertation chapter draft or anything over 20 pages. At worst, the discussant will bear some contempt for this burden; at best, you are diluting her ability to give you concise feedback on your work. A presentation is typically limited to 15 minutes. It takes roughly 2 minutes to read a double-spaced page of text. So anything more than 7 or 8 pages is more than you can say in the presentation.
  • Write a ‘data-driven’ essay. If you are an anthropologist, load it up with ethnographic material. If you are a historian or literature scholar, delve into the primary texts. This will give your discussant a better chance at assessing your analytical points. If you saturate your argument in theoretical goop, it will be frustrating for an outsider with a different perspective. (There are moments when strategic obfuscation is advisable, of course.)
  • Most importantly, you only have time in a presentation to develop ONE maybe two points. In any case, no one will remember more than two points, so keep it tight. It is always more effective to go in depth into one particular aspect of your research than try to sketch together myriad pieces in one whirlwind showcase.
  • Signal early on what your intentions with the paper are. ‘Map out’ the argument so your audience can get a sense of what is to come.

Prepare the presentation

  • The text you submitted to the discussant and what you will say in the presentation should not be the same. There are different opinions on this, but I believe priority #1 is to keep people’s attention for the time you are talking. People generally stay more tuned in when they sense that someone is speaking to them, not reading to them. Some reduce their presentation to a series of points they talk through. This has the advantage of being “live,” but it also runs the risk of rambling. You might run out of time without a prepared text. One of my panel co-presenters last weekend ran well past his 15 minutes without ever coming to anything resembling a conclusion; he had to be unceremoniously cut off at 20 minutes with a curt “thank you” from the time-keeper. Ouch. Remember that by going overtime you are antagonizing your audience and colleagues on the panel. Be courteous.
  • If you are going to read your paper, go to the trouble of making it ‘sound’ better to listeners’ ears. Good general rule: Edit your text so that almost every sentence does not exceed one line in length. Cut down compound and complex sentences into simple declarative ones.
  • Remove all but the most essential references in the spoken version.
  • Practice reading your paper aloud for flow, emphasis, and timing. Replace unnecessary jargon or technical terms with more colloquial speech. You want to be familiar enough with the writing that you can pick your head up and speak to people.
  • Rules of PowerPoint: your PPT slides should absolutely NOT replace your paper; i.e. you should not simply read a bunch of bullet points and text excerpts off the screen to your audience. Yawn.
  • Your PPT show should complement your discourse. Show an image to illustrate a point you are making. Consider inserting a blank slide for portions of the presentation when you want the audience’s attention on you, not on the screen.

At the event

  • If you are using audio-visual equipment, get to the panel session room early to test it out.
  • Listen to your co-presenters’ talks and take notes.
  • Graciously thank the organizers and/or sponsors before you get into your paper.
  • Towards the end of your presentation, a time-keeper will usually hold up signs signaling your remaining time. Just acknowledge these with a nod and adjust your speech as needed. No need to interrupt your own talk with an exasperated “whoa! only 2 minutes left?”
  • If there is Q&A or discussion time, try to make an effort to identify connections between your paper and your colleagues’. If the discussant or an audience member says something misinformed about your research, keep a poker face or just politely nod.

There must be more to add to this, so all ye commenters please fire away…

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Higher Education, Jobs, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style

Dissertations, Academia and Public Speaking

August 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

Last week I attended my first dissertation defense! It was during my residency in my doctoral program in Education. My program is a low residency program of study, meaning that the learners come together four times a year for face-to-face seminars and lectures while the rest of the year they work on their own. So when the cohorts come together it is a non-stop intensive time where everyone is pretty much involved in everyone else’s work, as well as their own. The seminars, discussion groups, and lectures are attended by almost all of the learners as well as faculty and staff. And when one of us is defending it is a must see, one of us actually made it! This particular dissertation defense had six faculty, the dean, several administrators and about 15 doctoral students.

It was truly a public event; I was excited and nervous to see what a particularly brilliant colleague would present, sure that I would feel intimidated on what his 300 page thesis would be like in comparison to my own work. The defense started with opening comments by the chair of the committee and then the doctoral candidate started into his PowerPoint presentation.  Within seconds my heart stopped and my skin started to crawl, every slide was a full written page of documentation, paragraph long quotes, long lists of numbers and statistics. The slides were impossible to read and had no visual graphing to help comprehension. And worst of all the presenter read his slides!!!! How was it possible that at this level we were still seeing a nervous and unskilled oral presentation? I pondered this through out the defense. Is the higher education system, from undergraduate to the doctoral level, still producing academics that have immense difficulty in communicating their own work?

I think in general we educators tend to still consider oral competency as a skill rather than a form of reasoning. Oral presentations do have platform skills and techniques but in academia orality is much more about relying on the spoken word rather than the written word to communicate meaning. It does not replace writing but it is much more than simply stating one’s written work.  I think speaking publicly does ask an individual a form of logic and knowledge that is different from writing and in some ways more complex.Oral reasoning must give meaning to data within a certain amount of time and space and this is no easy task.

I keep wondering about how the logic and sense-making aspect of speaking can be better integrated into the higher education curriculum rather than the 10-20 minute group presentations that seem to abound throughout American colleges. And whether this would make an impact on academics presenting their work in public. More than a personal quest, I do believe that public speaking and oral communication as art and logic should be a part of higher education all the way up to the dissertation defense and beyond.


Filed Under: Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations

PowerPoint: Official Weapon of Mass Persuasion

April 28, 2010 By 4 Comments

Image from the blog post Watercooler Confidential, "Death by PowerPoint." Click image for original post.

Government malfeasance and bureaucratic incompetence step aside: there’s now a new reason for the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s a product made by Microsoft. According to this widely circulated article in the New York Times, the over-use of PowerPoint, Microsoft’s sleep inducing presentation software, is the new menace threatening the success of the US military adventures in the Middle East. The article cites a growing number of high-ranking military officials who are increasingly critical of the communication platform. The greatest threat to clarity for many of these officials, the paper reports, is not the muddled mess of circles and arrows pictured above, but the emphasis on hierarchical thinking, which, according to several military officers, even those who frequently use PowerPoint, tends to dumb down and generalize the information being conveyed.

“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” said Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, adding “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.”

This complaint is, of course nothing new. Edward Tufte makes the near identical argument in his 2003 essay: “The Cognitive Style of Power Point: Pitching Out Corrupts within.” That essay includes a remarkable discussion of how NASA’s over-reliance on PowerPoint may have inadvertently been responsible for the failure of the Space Shuttle Columbia upon re-entry February1, 2003, claiming that reliance upon bulleted information led to a kind of sales pitch mentality, which obfuscated the real threat posed by the debris impact shortly after launch. “The language, spirit, and presentation tool of the pitch culture had penetrated throughout the NASA organization, even into the most serious technical analysis, the survival of the shuttle,” said Tufte.

Could this very well be what happened in May of that same year, when military and administration officials decided to invade Iraq in search of WMDs? Indeed, the actual decision to invade was obviously a cynical fait accompli, manufactured by The White House and Downing Street, but one can only imagine the great number of PowerPoint pitches that made that decision possible, not to mention the number that followed the invasion which helped to justify the continued presence of US troops in the absence of any chemical or nuclear weapons.

Each semester I teach a workshop on presentation basics to several groups of Business Department students here at Baruch, and, despite the continued uncritical reliance upon PowerPoint, or perhaps because of it, it seems like students are beginning to figure out that the templates Microsoft provides are maybe not the best place to begin their presentations. When I tell students “PowerPoint is for your audience, not for you;” when I try to explain the importance of presenting information visually in a clear and objective form; and when I make the suggestion that maybe they avoid using PowerPoint entirely, I don’t receive nearly as many looks of angry consternation as I used to. Perhaps, just like the generals interviewed for the Times piece, these students have been the victims of one too many redundant, unimaginative, and narrow-minded PowerPoint presentation (often from their instructors) and maybe, just maybe, they’re ready to move beyond the tyranny of the bullet-point.

Either way, there is at least one place where the use of PowerPoint may be expected to lose some of its attraction. I just found out that Edward Tufte has been hired by the Obama Administration as a member of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, to help investigate and clearly explain the impact of the $787 Billion economic stimulus package passed last year. If only we could now get him to explain credit default swaps to Congress.

Filed Under: Powerpoint and Presentations, Process

Teaching Naked or The Perils of PowerPoint

November 18, 2009 By 3 Comments

While many colleges, even in these tough economic times, are spending small fortunes outfitting their classrooms with the latest technology, The Chronicle is reporting that the dean of the Meadow School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University is actually taking computers out of the classroom. According to Dean Bowen, classrooms equipped with computers and internet access encourage, among other things, bad lectures. Bowen’s biggest complaint, not surprisingly is the use of PowerPoint lectures, which according to several polls, seem to be causing an epidemic of student boredom. Like so many Baruch BPL students, who have bored their fair share of Communication Fellows with meandering and pointless PowerPoint presentations, it seems teachers at Southern Methodist have a difficult time understanding how to use PowerPoint effectively to convey information visually. Although the article is more thorough, in the video above Bowen makes a good argument for why he took the computers out of the classroom, and he makes an especially good argument about the value and importance of interactive classroom discussions. But Bowen is no Luddite nor is he a neophyte when it comes to using technology in the classroom, and in many ways, this is where I part ways with Dean Bowen, who has reportedly used video games to teach his students about the history of Jazz and encourages his professors to put their lectures on podcasts so that students and professors can spend more time exploring lecture ideas in the classroom. What matters most about this argument, though, is that whether you use technology in the classroom or not, it is the ratio of student to teacher interaction that matters most. Perhaps there is a place for podcasts and classroom blogs (I would personally draw the line at video games) but these technologies should not become a substitute for student/teacher interaction.

Filed Under: Powerpoint and Presentations, Technology

Lessig at Educause

November 11, 2009 By 2 Comments

Below is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at last week’s Educause 2009: “It’s About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.”  This 60 minute presentation is well worth the time of anyone who’s interested how antiquated copyright laws are impacting ecologies of freedom, access, education, and science in the digital age.  After delineating how we got to where we are, he advocates that rather than reforming existing laws, we instead challenge them by building alternative structures that will more flexibly, appropriately, and ethically govern information use.  Technologists and educators have specific and crucial roles in this: technologists must “build the code” for sanity by making it easier for others to effectively play by new rules, and educators must perform and encourage in our students skepticism towards rules that simply no longer make sense.

Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.

Filed Under: Copyright, Powerpoint and Presentations Tagged With: , , ,

The TED Commandments: Rules Every Speaker Should Know

May 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Ted Commandments

The Ted Commandments (click to see larger version of the image)

I wish I had this for my students earlier this semester!  These Ten Commandments of public speaking are written on actual stone tablets.   TED records their speakers and anyone can download the talks from their website here.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Filed Under: Powerpoint and Presentations

Here’s Lookin At You, Kid…or Not.

March 9, 2009 By 4 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRAcZ2rTGPg&feature=related[/youtube]

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

Filed Under: Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Feedback, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Style, To Ponder

The Semester In Review

January 9, 2009 By 4 Comments

We (Hillary and Melis) were new to BPL 5100 during the Fall 2008 semester, and both felt that there was a lot to process once it had ended. After a semester of working with BPL student groups to prepare them for their capstone presentations, we wanted to find a way to use the blog to share our experiences. We came up with the idea of recording a videochat, thinking that it would be an experiment in having a public dialogue that would hopefully invite others to join the post-semester wrap-up.

We chose to focus on the theme of the ‘audience’ because we thought this was an important aspect of how students prepare for their presentations, and because it’s also the topic of the Spring symposium. We discussed the different ideas of the ‘audience’ that we found while rehearsing BPL presentations, as well as different aspects of what audience means for us as Communication Fellows, for our students, professors, and in the business environment.

Video chat is something we had often used for personal purposes but its usefulness for sharing ideas and communicating in the work environment is something we hadn’t fully explored. We’re including a short clip from our chat below, which will give you a glimpse into our conversation. We are looking for your comments and hope that this will help to generate new ideas about the role of the audience in student oral presentations as well as the potential use of video chat in increasing communication.

* Update January 19: A response from Agnieska:

agnieszka_video_comment

Filed Under: Audience, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations Tagged With:

PowerPoint in Literature Classes?

October 24, 2008 By 3 Comments

It was a pleasure attending last Wednesday’s staff meeting. In addition to the usual yummy sandwiches and cookies, I was particularly impressed by Tom’s VOCAT demonstration and our discussion on whether the use of Micro PowerPoint and technology in general opens up new possibilities or sets the limits of our analytical thinking skills. It is probably not an either-or question. Since Kate, Luke, David, Mikhail, Deborah, and Anthony have already elaborated on this topic through their recent postings, it won’t be necessary to reiterate the points they already made. There seems to be a general consensus that “PP” is a kind of necessary evil that should be handled by skilled hands until a better tool is invented. I agree that PowerPoint and other animated presentation software have an advantage especially in a global setting since image and non-verbal means of communication oftentimes enable us to overcome language and cultural barriers.

From http://www.blakearchive.org

From http://www.blakearchive.org
Click to enlarge.

I wonder, however, whether people have used PowerPoint or other multimedia presentation tools in English literature classes. I remember once in my Romanticism class the professor presented Blake’s illuminated poems in slides for us to read, which for me was quite a different way of “experiencing” poetry. It may sound counter-intuitive, but poetry might be the literary genre whose reading experience can be enhanced by certain visual aids due to the pictorial aspect of poetic language, which was illustrated by Horace’s phrase ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”) or Derrida’s emphasis on the spatial dimension of writing. Do those in literature or humanities have any stories to share or any tips to offer regarding the use of multimedia resources in class other than film screening? Another question in my mind is, if creating bullet points and inserting animated graphs and charts for a PowerPoint presentation indeed can be considered a genre of writing, how do we incorporate it into the existing composition curriculum? I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Filed Under: Powerpoint and Presentations

The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint

May 5, 2008 By 1 Comment

What would it look like if Honest Abe had PowerPoint at his disposal on that fateful day in 1863?

Quite possibly, this.

Its creator, Peter Norvig, also describes his rationale here, and considers the value of PowerPoint in “PowerPoint: Shot with its own bullets,” which was published in The Lancet.

We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bullet-pointed bathwater, but the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation might prove useful for those discussing with students (or colleagues) what makes for good (and bad) PowerPoint.

Filed Under: Powerpoint and Presentations, Technology, What if . . .
« Older Posts