Conference conclusions

Three days after I gave my paper, I still get a thrill when I think of a particular comment from someone who heard it. "I liked your paper," she said. "It was fun."

Fun? There's nothing fun about the typical academic conference paper, a jargon-bloated blast of rhetoric delivered at breakneck pace by someone who can't bear the thought of cutting a single word and so must speak so quickly to squeeze it all in that the ideas speed past too quickly for my ears to grab 'em.

Many presenters try to add a little zing to presentations with technology, but the same scholars who can't cut any words from their papers tend to overstuff their PowerPoint presentations. Adding jokes, video clips, and zooming text to a vapid paper isn't going to make it any less vapid.

Nothing against tech. I'd rather watch a well-constructed PowerPoint presentation than listen to a clumsy reader stumble through a written manuscript, but often we get the worst of both worlds: too much text on the slides; too little depth in the concepts.

I didn't use any bells and whistles for this presentation--no PowerPoint, no swooping Prezi, no clips or handouts or visual aides, just me at the front of the room with a handful of words. I read parts of my paper--the intro and some important points I didn't want to get wrong--but I knew my paper was too long so I skipped whole paragraphs and instead briefly summarized them off the cuff. 

But I did make people laugh. It wasn't a particularly funny topic, but if I see an opportunity to sum up an important point with a concise one-liner, I'll take it. The laughter confirmed that people were listening, and the discussion afterward confirmed that they got the point.

So what is my point? Partly I'm writing this to kill an hour while I await my connecting flight home--I'm afraid that if I stop thinking, I'll fall asleep and miss my boarding call. But partly I want to remind myself that this trip to Savannah was not just another time-wasting junket: I delivered a paper that made people laugh while it made them think, and at this point in my career, that's a good day's work.