My wishlist:
1. Tell us your main points and findings before you start (“I will show that the Earth is flat” or so) and sum up your paper at the end.
2. Tell us why we should listen to you. Yes, it’s interesting that you have studied childhood in India. But why can your research be interesting or relevant for us who are not specialists in your field? What new insights does your paper give regarding general theories in anthropology and being a human?
3. 20 minutes are 20 minutes. Stop talking when your time is over. Check the length of your presentation a few days before the conference, so that you avoid struggling with the introduction few minutes before your time is over.
4. Don’t read from your paper. Talk to and with your audience! By reading from your paper you show disrespect to your audience. This is the most important point and can’t be stressed enough. Many speakers at conferences and seminars don’t bother presenting their papers in a way that is understandable for us who came to listen. We have discussed anthropological writing. Maybe we should also talk about anthropological talking. Anthropologists can’t write. Maybe they can’t talk either.
UPDATE 1:
Steve Portigal, a customer research consultant using ethnography, has written a brilliant post about his experiences at academic conferences, among others about a conference with both anthropologists and designers.
Meanwhile, the theory presentations emerged. And here we saw the academic tradition, I believe, where instead of a presentation or a talk, a paper was delivered. Several people in a row stood in, some without any visual aids, and read. For forty-five minutes. They read. At least one person had the ability to jump in and out of his text, make eye contact, and spontaneously offer up a clarification or a hand gesture. But others simply read. It was horrifying. The density of prose was (as with the 7-minute DUX example above) way beyond my ability to parse and it was boring and not engaging.
(…)
But back to the reading. What the hell? Is this standard? How is this a way to convey information or start a dialog? I got a lot of grumbling from my colleagues about this; some would have rather read the paper on their own time, rather than coming a great distance to watch someone else read it. Others just stopped coming into the sessions.
A common experience: The speakers go over time. Five minutes before their offical time is over, they still struggle with their introduction. I always wondered why they haven’t checked the length of their presentations before.
Steve Portigal writes:
(…)
a read paper could not be modified when time ran out, and so facilitators inched closer to presenters in the hopes of having them wrap things up, but no, darn it, I’ve written these 20000 words and I’m going to spit them at you regardless of what time it is. The emphasis was not on making connections between people and other people and ideas. It was really a drag.
>> read the whole post by Steve Portigal
UPDATE 2:
Denise Carter comments:
Reading How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk? had me nodding along in agreement at the wishlist.
(…)
I’ve had some experience of conference presentations in various parts of the world with poor presentations that had left me bored and fidgety. Hence I have already decided NOT to write a paper, but instead, to write a presentation around my topic ‘Order and Disorder in the Virtual City’. My intention is that a fruitful and enlightening dialogue will emerge that will clarify some of my ideas – resulting in a more rounded and polished paper that will address some important issues.
UPDATE 3:
See also What’s the point of anthropology conferences?
Links updated 17.9.2021
My wishlist:
1. Tell us your main points and findings before you start ("I will show that the Earth is flat" or so) and sum up your paper at the end.
2. Tell us why we should listen to you. Yes, it's…
