This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I’m giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I’m even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I’ll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of “paper” and “presentation”:
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and then adapt it to a suitable format for presentation*? Or do you write your talk first and then use it as the basis for a paper (which might be more lengthy, formal, detailed, etc.)?
Is this a pattern you’re happy with, or do you ever think you’d rather do it the other way around? (If the latter, what exactly is stopping you or has stopped you from doing it the other way around?)
_________
*Opinions vary on what counts as a suitable format for presentation. There’s this practice in philosophy where, rather than giving a talk, a philosopher will read the audience a paper. This sometimes happens even in instances where the paper has circulated to audience members in advance — which means you can watch the presenter reading his or her paper while audience members read along on their own photocopies of the same paper.
Maybe it’s my early training as a chemist (since, in chemistry, no one gives this sort of presentation), but I have always found the reading-to-the-audience format offputting. But, it’s one where clearly the writing of the paper comes before the “writing of the talk”.
I always write the talk before the paper. Comments on the talk are often helpful in shaping and directing the more exacting and comprehensive paper. I’ve always found that rehearsing the argument in front of a live studio audience helpful in the paper writing phase because inevitably you will hear what will ultimately be referees’ comments and it lets you think about them beforehand.
In physics, there are very few meetings that publish full paper proceedings, so this rarely comes up. There’s usually not anything other than the talk, for me.
The Optical Society of America does an odd thing with some of its meetings (CLEO/QELS), where they ask for a detailed summary of the work six months in advance, when you apply for the meeting, and then they publish those. This gives you a choice between talking about stuff that was presentable six months before the meeting, which is old news by the time you give the talk, or writing a detailed article about what you hope to have in six months, and trying to steer the experiment in that direction. In either case, the “paper” is written well before the talk, and, in fact, may or may not resemble the talk that actually gets given.
In the other case where I’ve submitted a paper that was published in a conference proceedings, I wrote the paper about two months after the meeting, when they reminded me of the deadline for submissions for the proceedings.
I write the blog, then the paper, then the talk. Then I rewrite the paper. Then I get confused and rewrite the blog, or maybe the paper. Then I have a beer. And another. Then I go to sleep and forget where I got to last and rewrite all three.
Hey, it works for me! [Although, given recent experiences, maybe I should lighten up on the beer. By the way, I met Roberta today.]
For me, always the talk before the paper. Powerpoints are such a great way to present information, and I can figure out the rational order, graphical depictions of what I’m trying to demosntrate, etc, far more easily than I can just write it down in a paper.
Great question! It’s helpful thinking about this stuff.
Talk first. Definitely. It’s far less daunting to tackle a 15 minute (or even a 40 minute) talk than to stare at the blank white page and try to will a review paper into existence. Besides, preparing the talk helps me focus the line of reasoning that’ll show up in the paper.
Man am I glad that, as you point out, no one in chemistry just reads their papers. (Since, I’m a 2nd year chemistry grad.)
What are you speaking on?
Usually talk, then paper. Every once in awhile I do paper, then talk, but in that case I’ve always already written the paper for some other purpose (dissertation!).
I also tend not to “write” talks so much as I outline them. There’s nothing worse that being read to. Ugh!
[And I met John — nice to finally meet you in person! What losers are we, still surfing the internet and posting on other people’s blogs even while at a conference?
]
Roberta, my biggest concern about the conference at Purdue is whether there will be easy internet access, so count me among the losers!
Grad, I’ll be speaking on ” ‘Magic hands’ and reproducible results” in a session on incorporating ethics into the chemistry curriculum. (Basically, looking at what ethical issues flow from the ideal that experiments should be reproducible, and whether this might put an *extra* burden on people with very good lab technique.)
Ok, well, there’s comfort in numbers, anyway! Plus, I should say “geeks” (or was it “nerds”? now I forget) not losers.
Now that I’ve filled your thread with irrelevancies, I suppose I ought to answer the question asked. I have been known to:
• write the paper, then the slides (The advantage here is that when the conference is over, you have a paper to send out somewhere).
• write the slides, then the paper (usually, the paper would be written after the talk in this case, and sent out to publish somewhere)
(Then, of course, there might be multiple slide rewrites for different conferences, and/or multiple paper rewrites.)
• write the slides, then never get around to writing the paper
Sometimes I read the paper with slides, and sometimes I just present from slides. It depends on how detailed my argument is; the more detailed, the more likely I am to read the paper (but, always with slides to help out with quotes and other difficult parts).
Jeez, can I be any more unhelpful? I guess I do what I most motivated to do, and most comfortable with, given my mood and the topic — and obviously, that differs from case to case.
It’s probably a bit early in my career to say what I ‘usually’ do, but at the end of my PhD the panicked need to have a coherent story to tell at a conference was a key motivator in finally crystallising my ideas. Perhaps more significantly, encounters with sceptical minds at the conference itself didn’t change my conclusions, but did lead to significant changes in the way in which I built up the case for them in the final papers I’ve just submitted (I learnt to my surprise that of the two datasets I had, the less well-constrained one was more convincing to the outsider, and needed to be presented first). It is useful to see how your line of argument fares against someone who isn’t as close to your research as you are.
But it does depend on the type of meeting – I can see situations where I would want to give an overview of previous work to draw some general conclusions rather than presenting some new stuff
The Optical Society of America does an odd thing with some of its meetings (CLEO/QELS), where they ask for a detailed summary of the work six months in advance, when you apply for the meeting, and then they publish those. This gives you a choice between talking about stuff that was presentable six months before the meeting, which is old news by the time you give the talk, or writing a detailed article about what you hope to have in six months, and trying to steer the experiment in that direction.
This is absolutely standard in biomed research, at least the few conferences I’ve been to. It drives me nuts. It’s one of the many reasons why I go to so few conferences. That’s why we call it “research”, assholes: I CANNOT KNOW what results I will have in six months’ time.
In re: paper or talk, I don’t like conferences so I write papers and then turn them into talks or (worst of all) posters only if someone twists my arm really hard. This is why I am cheering so hard for science blogging — I want to be able to find collaborations and get a sense of what the field is doing on a daily basis by RSS, instead of on a yearly basis by going to a conference.
There’s an article about that in the latest issue of Nature. Serendipity?
Bob
I’m a grad student and have given just two talks at conferences (and looking forward to the next one in September). The first time (two years ago) my results were not quite complete, and giving the talk and getting questions and comments was very helpful when it came to writing the paper a few months later. The second talk (last year) was an overview of the paper, which had since then been published, with a couple additional details from my newest results. The frustrating thing was not being able to say everything and limiting the talk to the major points. My upcoming talk will feature results of my current study in progress, and I expect to write the paper a few months later, as previously. It is a cycle that I find quite convenient overall.