A few weeks back I was at an academic political science conference in Belfast. I strongly resisted the temptation to bunk off and go shopping (peace dividend = awesome shopping) and went to virtually all the conference sessions. I have some observations.
One of the themes which came out really strongly was the academic / practitioner divide. This is very much in common with marketing and business conferences in which academics often complain about how those pesky practitioners don't really 'get' their stuff (always assuming they even bother to read it in the first place). The first keynote I went to in Belfast was about the same thing - how important it is for academics to make their stuff accessible to non-academics, to resist the tendency to see anything accessible as being a sign of dumbing down and so on. This seems fairly uncontroversial to me but generated quite the discussion. I'd also propose taking it one step further and encouraging academics to make their stuff accessible to other academics. Having sat through around 30 papers over my 3 days in Belfast I can attest that good presentation skills were in short supply. My suggestions then for good conference paper presentations are as follows:
- Please start by introducing yourself - probably you're so super-eminent that you need no introduction and it's entirely my own fault that I don't know who you are but still... have mercy on me and consider starting with your name. In an ideal world people who ask questions afterwards would do the same thing. It's particularly helpful for out-of-towners like me from other disciplines who don't necessarily know everyone.
- Along similar lines, what's your paper going to be about? It helps to have some kind of agenda to the presentation so I know where we're up to and what's coming next.
- If you're given 15 minutes then please only take 15 minutes. Perhaps you might practice your paper beforehand so you know whether you can do it in 15 minutes or not? Just a thought... In a 90 minute session with 4 papers to present it's common for each person to go over time so that by the end the last person has only 5 minutes to present and there's no real time for questions. The questions are usually the most interesting bit.
- I'm giving up my valuable time (and have paid actual money - in this case it was my own actual money) to come and watch you present so it irks me to be told that this is just something you threw together because your head of department would only pay for you to come if you had a paper accepted, or to watch you present slides that clearly took less than 30 seconds to put together, or have obviously been adapted from those you prepared for another conference.
- Consider standing up to present. Not only does this tend to make for a much more dynamic presentation but it also helps the people at the back who can't see you if you stay seated. Also on the subject of dynamism, I'm not wild about spending time watching someone read a script - I can read the paper myself so if you're just going to read it out for me then save us both some time and just give me the handout.
These are all things which are also common at marketing and business conferences so they're by no means confined to political sciences people (although I will say that I've never seen someone read their paper word for word at a marketing conference). All of us who teach know that you can't get away with such stuff in front of students because it makes for boring and unengaging lectures. If a student did it in an assessed presentation they'd likely get a poor grade. With that in mind then it's a complete mystery to me why a conference presenter would do it.
It's worth noting that by far the best presentation that I saw was given by a non-academic. An ex-loyalist paramilitary stood up and spoke eloquently (without notes and with no slides) about what he did during the troubles and the future of loyalism. He was passionate about his subject, articulate and engaging. I found him absolutely compelling as, judging by the number of questions he got afterwards, did many other people in the audience. There were absolutely no academic bells and whistles in his presentation - just him talking about his experiences, getting straight to the point and arguing from the heart. Something we could all learn from when presenting at future conferences, I think.
