Tips on preparing and delivering a conference paper, and on fielding questions

There have been many fine papers at the SEP-FEP conference this year. In this post I thought I would distill some of the paper-delivering ‘best practice’ from the past three days and combine it with other advice I have been given and picked up over the years. These reflections are a personal digest of what I have seen done well, and I’m sure that others would come up with a very different list. There is more than one way to skin this particular cat.

Planning and writing the paper

• Don’t try to say too much (usually try to say one thing well, even if you say it in different ways).
• Make EVERYTHING explicit. The audience have two things against them when it comes to understanding your paper: 1) they are not as close to the material as you are, and 2) they are trying to grasp your point after hearing it once, rather than after reading it many times (as you have done). Add to that the normal human vicissitudes of digestion, tiredness and daydreaming, and you end up with a situation in which you will probably have to work quite hard to make your point intelligible and accessible. Don’t assume any moves in your chain of reasoning, and spell things out in a way that may even seem a little obvious and crude to you. Chances are, your audience will appreciate it.
• Make your signposting explicit. Use phrases like “In the second section of my paper I now want to…”; “this is really important because…”; “Let me start with x, before moving on to y.” You could try starting the first sentence of the paper like this: “In this paper I want to…” That way, people will know right from the very beginning where you are planning to take them.
• Hit your main point again at the very end of the talk, so that it’s fresh in people’s minds when the question time starts, and so that people whose attention has drifted still go away with your main point in their heads.
• If you say anything controversial or unconventional in your reading of a particular thinker, try to make the point with a direct quotation. It’s much harder for people to dismiss your argument that way.
• Say things as simply as you can without being simplistic. Don’t ape the idiom of the thinker you are discussing.
• Answer the ‘so what?’ question and answer it early. What is at stake in what you are saying? If your argument is correct, what difference does it make? If you give people early a sense of what hangs on what you are saying and you will impede mental drift.
• Use exposition to serve your argument, not as an end in itself. Use what material you need from your thinker or thinkers to lay out your argument, but don’t describe what they say for its own sake. It is your argument that should drive the paper forward, and everything else should arrange itself around that.
• You can get away with much denser prose when people are reading you then when they are listening to you. Shorten your sentences and rein in the subordinate clauses.
• If you can find examples or illustrations of the argument you are making, especially examples that leave a visual impression in the mind, they can really help people latch on to what you are saying. (Just note how often it’s the images and examples that come up in the question times: they are what people seem to engage with most).
• As you prepare the paper, note down likely questions that will come your way, and the answers you will give. Make a special point of planning answers to the questions about the weakest points in your paper.

Delivering the paper

• Eye contact really helps, even if it’s not all the time and even if you are reading word for word.
• Any non-verbal communication you can add (within reason!)—hand gestures, changes of intonation and so forth—will also really help your audience to engage with what you are saying.
• If you are not using a microphone, speak up.
• Use silence to your advantage. Don’t speak at 100 miles an hour from the first word to the last, but slow down and use pauses to emphasise important points and to let ideas sink in before you move to the next one. Don’t go slow and use pauses every other sentence, but one or two pauses in a paper can help people understand what you are saying, and also bring people back if their attention is drifting.
• The same goes for repetition. A little judicious repetition can really help your audience, but mechanical or too frequent repetition can become tedious.
• If you are using quotations and don’t have a handout, let people know when the quotations begin and end (by saying something like “quote… close quote” perhaps).
• Basically, you are there to serve the audience by helping them to understand something you think is important and worth saying. You are communicating to human beings, and communication is about lots more than the words on the page.

Timekeeping

• Rough rule of thumb (depending on how fast you speak and how much you extemporise): 20 minutes: 2400 words. 25 minutes: 2900 words.
• You will probably take more time (if you extemporise) or less time (if you speak fast through nervousness) to deliver the talk on the day than you do in private beforehand.
• Keep your own time. Put your watch on the desk so you how you are travelling time-wise at all points, and are not surprised by the “one minute to go” sign being waved in your face when you are only half way through.
• If you are particularly concerned about timekeeping, write time notes in the margin of your talk (for example: put a “10” in the margin at the point in the talk you had reached by the 10 minute mark in rehearsal). As you go through the talk ‘for real’, you will know whether you are ahead of or behind schedule.
• Don’t go over time. Ask the panel chair before the beginning of the session how long she/he wants each speaker to go for, and how long is being left for questions (some people will want 20 minutes + 10 for questions, others will allow 25 + 5, for example). It will almost certainly be better to cut some of your paper in order to keep to time rather than go over time (which is a discourtesy to the other participants in the panel). If you know what your main point is, you can always sum things up relatively quickly if you run out of time by just coming back to your central argument.
• For example, if you are one of three speakers in a 90 minute panel, go in with a 25 minute version of your paper and a 20 minute version (with some unnecessary paragraphs in grey for example, that you can skip if you need to keep it to 20 minutes).
• Be prepared for one of the speakers on your panel not to turn up and you therefore being given more time than you had envisaged.
• Equally, be prepared for someone being added to the panel at the last minute, with a consequent diminution in the time you have available.

If you are planning to use technology (video etc.)

• Test it and set it up before the session begins. Don’t try to do so at the start of your paper.
• Make sure that you have a ‘plan B’ in the case that it simply won’t work.
• Can you use a paper handout instead? It won’t break down or fail to load, and people can take it away with them.

Handling questions

• Take notes on questions as they are asked, so that in the heat of the moment you don’t forget what someone has said (this is also useful for remembering later what you were asked, in case you want to think further about any of the questions).
• Perhaps note also the answer you will give as the question is being asked, by writing single ‘trigger’ words to jog your memory so that you don’t forget what you had planned to say 30 seconds earlier.
• Know what your main thesis is, and try to bring questions back to your main point.
• If you don’t know the answer, don’t pretend you do…
• …but that doesn’t necessarily mean you just have to say “I don’t know”. You might be able to say something a bit more substantive, like “That’s a question that I don’t know the answer to, but it is really interesting because it opens up the whole area of x, which is really important to what I’m talking about…”, or if the question is taking you way away from what the paper was in fact about, something like “That’s a really interesting question for those who want to want to think about these issues in terms of xyz. My approach has the advantage, however, that it opens up questions of abc…” Of course if you fail to engage with the question at all this sort of response can come across as stone-walling, but it can sometimes be useful for real red herrings.
• Sometimes, questions are not clear. Don’t be afraid to ask a question of the question: “How are you using the term x?” for example, or “I don’t understand: why would your conclusion follow from what I’ve said?”, or even, if someone goes on for a while and you’re not quite sure what they are getting at, “so your question in a sentence would be…?”
• If someone asks a question relating your paper to a thinker you have never heard of, don’t be afraid to relate it back to who you are talking about (that’s what the question time should be about, after all): “I’m not familiar with the figure you mention, but the interesting thing about what you say in relation to my paper is that…”

Asking questions of others

• Be as clear as you can about what you are asking. Strip out of the question everything that is not necessary, because sometimes people can latch onto something peripheral in what you have said and never get to your real question.
• Perhaps write down your question (or notes at least), to make sure that you can get it out concisely and correctly.