Chad Orzel has an excellent post up about good ways to use PowerPoint for a presentation. In a similar vein, I’d like to offer some reasons for academics in disciplines (like philosophy) in which it is the convention to read papers to each other at professional meetings to consider breaking with tradition and not just reading the papers they are presenting.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers. Yes, when I saw it the first time, coming to philosophy via chemistry where people don’t do this, it confused the heck out of me, too. The setting in which this manner of presentation struck me as the most misguided was in department colloquia where the speaker had sent a copy of the paper ahead so that people had time to read it — and indeed, many people in attendance had photocopies of the paper with them at the colloquium — and yet, the speaker still read the paper to these presumably literate members of the audience!
Academic philosophers are a funny bunch, and a complete analysis of their customs is beyond the scope of this post. My goal for the moment is to urge examination of this particular custom — and some of its pitfalls — in the hopes that it may lead to more productive communication at future conferences and colloquia. (Am I looking out for my own interests as a person in the audience for philosophy presentations? You’re darn tootin’!)
1. Reading a paper robs your audience of a visual focus.
Not everyone absorbs ideas easily just by hearing them. Some people are more visual learners. Unless you’re prepared to lose the visual learners in your audience from the word go, simply reading your paper is a suboptimal strategy for conveying the ideas in it. At the very least, you’ll want a handout or some slides that highlight the crucial points.*
2. Reading a paper cuts you off from audience feedback.
When you read a paper, your eyes track the words on the page. This means you aren’t making eye contact with the people listening to the paper — you can’t see whether they’re nodding, or looking puzzled, or sneaking out of the room. Nor, for that matter, can you see whether they are straining to hear, which means you may end up reading your paper so softly that most of the people in your audience fail to hear the most important parts.
3. Reading a paper often makes it harder for your audience to distinguish important points from less important ones.
I suspect some of the philosophers who read their papers do so because they have labored to find just the right words to express their ideas precisely. The problem is, unless the paper is written to flag these (e.g., “Here is the crucial formulation …” or “Here is my main argument against Smith …”), the most carefully chosen words can float by and sound, to the audience, scarcely different from the 200 words that came before them or the 800 words that will follow. If you’re too precious about your words and that is what’s motivating you to read your paper rather than to “talk” it, it’s worth considering whether this is the best strategy for having your precisely chosen words stick.
4. Reading formulae with Ps and Qs, or any claims with Greek letters, is inviting your audience to tune out.
Seriously, for equations, definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions, either put them on the screen or in a handout, or just shut up about them. If they’re part of your paper that is important, they will require visual transmission and explanation — it won’t be enough just to read them to your audience.
5. Reading your paper makes your timing less flexible.
It’s easy to try to cram in more than you really have time to communicate by just reading more quickly, although this almost always makes it harder for your audience to absorb it. Sure, it’s possible to skip pages or sections as you are reading, but the transitions tend to be more jarring than they might be if you had your main points on slides that could be explained in more or less detail depending on what your time allowed.
Some people do a fine job delivering talks from written papers, but they are hardly ever just reading their papers. Rather, they are finding ways to engage the live audience in front of them. And really, isn’t this part of the point of a presentation? Shouldn’t the transmission of ideas in a live, face-to-face context be different from the transmission of ideas in the pages of a journal? (If not, why don’t they produce journals-on-tape so scholars can catch up on the literature while they commute or work out?)
People who come to presentations want to be engaged by the ideas that are being presented. People presenting their ideas want to be understood. Any convention that gets in the way of these goals probably needs to be tweaked or swapped out for a convention that accomplishes them more effectively.
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* Once you have slides or a handout that highlight your crucial points, it’s not all that hard to “talk” your paper — that is, to really deliver it as a presentation — rather than to read it.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers.
What with being married to a lapsed musicologist, I knew all about this. And, yeah, it still floors me anyway. But, then again, the fields are so different that expecting a similar mode of presentation isn’t really reasonable.
But this:
4. Reading formulae with Ps and Qs, or any claims with Greek letters, is inviting your audience to tune out.
Seriously, for equations, definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions, either put them on the screen or in a handout, or just shut up about them. If they’re part of your paper that is important, they will require visual transmission and explanation — it won’t be enough just to read them to your audience.
Is that for real? What are people thinking? Sure, I’ve seen the integral limerick, but you generally can’t recite equations and expect anybody to get much out of it…!
It’s easy to try to cram in more than you really have time to communicate by just reading more quickly, although this almost always makes it harder for your audience to absorb it.
Of course, I (and I suspect everybody else) has seen exactly this same sin made with people doing traditional science-style talks. I was at an invited 20-minute talk by Saul Perlmutter once, where he actually started out talking at a reasonable rate. By the end, however, the baud rate was showing an exponential expansion as he attempted to get the last 40 minutes of the talk in. I commented to the guy sitting next to me (who also, like me at the time, was working with Saul) that Saul was trying to give a performance art interpretation of the accelerating Universe.
I did hear a talk at an American Astronomical Society once from a historian on the life of Caroline Herschel, which was quite good. He apologized ahead of time, knowing he was doing what scientists thought was weird, but went ahead and read the paper. He had a handful (literally) of slides that went up behind him, but they were more just illustrations rather than something integral to the talk. (Science slides tend to be integral to the talk.)
My wife is always impressed that I effective just go in and improvise all the talks I do. That’s not really what I’m doing, but I haven’t memorized my lines ahead of time, or anything like that. I much prefer it that way….
I also heard a colloquium the other day (on a mathematical physics talk) where the format of the slides was a paper summary. Literally, it was a continuous scroll of text, divided into pages. The speaker didn’t quite read it, but he parapharsed it. That was all it was, the whole way through. Now, the speaker did come from a different culture (as in nationality, rather than as in field), but nonetheless I didn’t find it a terribly effective speaking style.
-Rob
This might or might not be applicable in all fields, but I have concluded after giving and hearing many technical talks that the best approach is to put very few words on the charts. Put plots or some major points, but as few words as possible. If you have a lot of words on a chart, you typically are giving your audience a choice of listening to you or reading your charts; they can’t do both at the same time.
I am always impressed when I go to lectures in the humanitities and they give papers without using any visual aids. Some are able to give very good talks, keeping their audience interested by making their talk into a good story. This is something I think scientists forget with all their use of visual aids. What is the story?
I have heard that because the humanities-types make their living by words, they are scared to death to appear in front of their colleagues as being anything less than perfectly literate and perfect in their grammar, syntax, etc. Therefore, the reading of the papers. I’m not sure this is enough of a theory to explain a long-standing tradition but I think there is something to it. The first time I went to a non-science-y conference and gave a non-science-y paper, I did not read my paper; I presented it (without visual aids, because they told me there would be no slide projecter [back before Power Point]) as I would a science talk, by talking about the work, rather than reading the prepared paper. I think everyone was stunned, but I was the only person on the panel to get questions. Possibly because I was the only person on the panel to keep my audience awake and engaged. I did get requests for copies of my prepared paper, which I had brought with me and handed out afterwards. I am sure, however, that I sparked no revolution among attendees of that conference.
Interestingly, at the Frontiers in Education conference which I just attended, presenters did not “read” their papers. These were engineers who were giving papers that were more like the kinds of papers you might find in the humanities. Okay, well, the social sciences. But still – lots and lots and lots of words, because the conference was about engineering education, not about engineering. No slides of equations. There were data tables, statistics, but there were lots and lots of word slides. It was a nice blend of the two ends of the spectrum, and the talky talk, as opposed to the reading talk, definitely worked very well. One person, I think, read their prepared remarks and it was boring. Nobody read their paper, but everybody had to submit a paper prior to the conference. Talks were based on the papers.
I’ve noticed that at philosophy talks in particular, the reading of papers has a, well, rigidifying (can one say that?) effect. Although I’ve been to admittedly few conferences, the talks I’ve attended where people have simply read has had an attitude of “well, now you have it, why would you need to talk about it?” They seemed to feel that their papers were so perfect that by reading them to us, they had magically transmitted their entire knowledge of the subject and convinced us of the incredible rightness of their view.
Is there anything more boring than going to a “debate” where both participants read multi-page essays that they wrote about each others’ work? Seriously. Both of the men sat down and read essays they had written, one of which was a response to the other, and that was called a debate. A few people asked clarifying questions at the end, but they were generally told “I addressed that on page X of my paper.” For a field as dedicated to argument as philosophy, it seems like this setup is explicitly designed to discourage it.
When I asked a question, basically asking for clarification using a different set of terms (I was in Intro Phil. This was the first academic conference I’d ever attended, and I wanted to make sure that he’d said what I thought he’d said), I was told outright “No, I can’t explain it to you.” (Which, in the context of the situation read as “you and your question are not important enough for me to bother with,” not “I am incapable of explaining this concept in a manner in which you would understand”) Then, since the entire conference time had been used up reading papers and not answering questions, everyone filed out again. I changed majors relatively shortly thereafter.
Anyone who knows anything about effective written and oral communication knows that the kinds of sentence and paragraph structures that make for good written communication are *completely* different from those that make for good oral communication. To read a superbly-written paper out loud is to absolutely guarantee that you are using sentence and paragraph structures that are poorly suited to oral communication. Likewise, to transcribe an outstanding talk is to absolutely guarantee poorly written gibberish.
“If someone can understand in thirty minutes what it took you weeks to develop, then you’re in the wrong business.” – Leslie Lamport
I call bullshit on the Leslie Lamport statement – the purpose of most presentations is to present results, not your research process.* And if you cannot break that down into communicatable units – be they presentations, papers, or books – then you are the wrong business.
*Ok, there is the occasional technical paper, but how often are those called upon compared with results papers?