Tip Tuesday | Conferences (Part 2)
It’s now only four days until I depart for my first conference trip to Amphorae XI in Auckland, New Zealand! With this in mind, I thought I would use today’s #TipTuesday to continue the conference theme and talk about conference paper preparation. Conferences are a great opportunity to present your research to peers outside your immediate university sphere, so it’s wise to take advantage of the opportunity and present a paper. Here are my top four tips for preparing.Â
Choose your topic wisely
Suggesting you pick a topic is the most obvious tip but it can also be one of the hardest things to do when you’re a postgrad student! When 99% of your time is spent focusing on your thesis topic, it can be difficult to decide what aspect you could draw on to create a 20-minute paper. You can certainly find something else to present on (I recently presented a 20-minute paper on the paraclausithyron - a lament beside a door - in Latin elegy) and I encourage you to have side projects along the way, but conferences are a rare opportunity to receive feedback and discuss your research as you develop it. The paper I am presenting at Amphorae is actually derived from a short essay topic I designed as part of my Graduate Research Certificate coursework, which I’ve then further developed over the last six months. While it is technically not part of my thesis, its themes - imperialism, the history of emotions, provincial management - are. This means a lot of the research I’ve done is useful for my thesis, so I’m not over-extending myself trying to juggle too many research topics at once.Â
Write it!
Perhaps another obvious point, but nevertheless the largest component. It is, after all, hard to present a paper you haven’t written. The beautiful thing is that you can essentially write your paper in any way you like. I personally write mine in a relaxed essay style, but I know many academics who can simply write their paper as dot points and talk for days. Here are some general rules I follow when writing a paper:
Work out your word limit. Find an article online and copy it into a word document. Then time yourself for a minute as you read out loud at an appropriate speed for presenting to an audience. Do this a couple of times and you’ll be able to find out how many words you say per minute. This can then be used as a guide for the length of your paper depending on time. For example, a 20-minute paper as I read it is between 2,700 and 3,000 words.
Draft an outline. Once you have your topic, jot down a simple outline so you have some direction. This outline may change as your paper develops, but it will keep you on track and prevent you from getting lost in your topic.
Don’t over complicate it. Depending on your audience, there may be people who won’t understand the concepts and jargon you take for granted as common knowledge because you deal with them every day. If you’ve got a friend in a different department, it’s often useful to have them flick through your paper; they’ll point out any concepts or phrasing that may go over the heads of people outside your specific field.
Include cues. If you’re making a slide presentation to partner with your paper, make sure you include cues for slide transitions or animations. This can be whatever you like, such as a ** or a ----. As long as you can differentiate it from your writing, you’ll have clear indicators so you don’t accidentally miss important slides. I make my slides as I go so also write the cues as I go, but they can easily be added after.
Read it. Once you have drafted your paper, make sure you spend some time reading it aloud. It’s the best way to notice awkward syntax that might trip you up on the day.
Practice. As Bob Ross says:
Write the abstract
An abstract is a short descriptor of your topic, usually between 200 and 300 words. An abstract doesn’t just summarise your paper; it introduces your topic, points out gaps in scholarship (that your paper addresses), and outlines the significance of your research. This is (for me at least) the hardest part about writing a paper, mostly because there’s no one outline’ for writing an abstract in the humanities discipline so I won’t attempt to provide one. Instead, I’ll point you in the direction of some of the best resources I have found with some very useful tips:
“Tips for Writing Conference Paper Abstracts” from the Department of History at the North Carolina State University.
“How to Write an Abstract: Tips and Samples” by Leah Carroll from the Berkley University of California.
Make a slide presentation
Slides are an excellent visual aid for any paper presentation. Everyone learns differently, so having a visual aspect broadens your ability to engage with your audience. This doesn’t mean that you put your whole paper on your slides, though. They should always be an accessory used to enhance your presentation, not draw attention away from it. This is also why you should use backgrounds that are aesthetically pleasing but not overpowering. Choose softer colours or white backgrounds with coloured detail on the sides: the focus should always be on the content, not the slide itself.
Here are some example slides from my recent presentation about the paraclausithyron in Latin elegy. I could tell you I chose blue as my background colour because it is often associated with performance, confidence, or optimism, but really I chose it because it provided an attractive background that isn’t as stark as white, but is also not overbearing when put through a projector (which usually makes a colour lighter).Â
This slide has concise points that both signpost the direction of my discussion and summarise the key points. The font is large so it was visible even from the very back of a room, and I chose a sans serif font because it is easier to read from a back-lit screen (while serif fonts are best for printed work).
This slide provides the text I was analysing, allowing the audience to follow along as I read out this portion of the poem, and when I conducted a close reading I could draw the audience’s attention to specific points rather than rely on them to remember the wording.
I hope you find these tips useful. Now go write that paper - you never know when you might have an opportunity to present!
~ Admin @sassy-cicero-says Â
