Yesterday I got up in the morning and I ran 87 miles. Then I cleaned my entire house with a toothbrush. Then I went into the woods, sawed down a bunch of trees, lugged them out, and built a barn. Then I prepared a nine-course meal for 23 people and drank, by myself, four cases of wine. But before I went to bed, I wrote this column.
I've known for months that it was due today. But, as you can see, I was too busy doing other things to spend much time on it. I dashed it off last night so I can present it here before you today. I don't know if it's any good or not.
Yeah, right.
I go to a lot of readings. At creative-writing conferences, creative writers read their work, and at academic conferences, academics read theirs. The faculty here invites poets, fiction writers, and nonfictioneers to come to the campus. Our graduate students in creative writing have a monthly reading series. The university brings biologists, historians, and philosophers to speak. And Spokane has an annual literary festival—a weeklong series of, yes, more readings.
The truth is, I hate being read to. Well, that's not actually the truth. I love audio books. I look forward to long drives on which I can settle in and listen to either the author or, more typically, an actor, for hours. A well-trained reader can change the experience of a book: If the prose is good, it sings. (On the other hand, for some plot-driven mysteries, which are more suitable to skimming than savoring, every clumsy sentence clangs.) There are rare authors whose performative abilities can turn you into a groupie. (Do you hear me, Sherman Alexie? Groupie!)
But for the most part, those of us who write for a living are more comfortable camped out behind a computer screen than prancing around in front of a live audience. And maybe it's just me, but being able to follow by ear a portion of a short story, a section of a novel, a part of an essay, or even whole poems is often too taxing. To the outside world I may seem to be listening, but really I'm making a list of the things I need to pack for my next trip, trying to figure out how to rearrange the furniture in my living room, or destroying my cuticles.
More often than I can believe, someone will preface a reading by saying, "I just wrote this last night." Why on earth, I wonder, would you read something that raw? Generally public readings are set up months in advance. It's not like the speakers don't know they're going to have to have something ready. I don't get it. Maybe it's because I tend toward the neurotic. Maybe it's because I know that my own work needs lots of time to settle and be picked over before it's inflicted on others. If I have to read something, I polish it until it's shiny. The idea of presenting something that's not fully formed seems as disrespectful as it is arrogant. It puts me in mind of little children who are proud of their poop: Because it comes out of them, it has to be worthy of interest.
When I shared with a friend my wonderment at those who read a piece they'd dashed off the night before, she looked at me as if I had just told her I'd bought a time share in a swamp. She said: "They're lying."
That had never occurred to me. But then I remembered that arrogance is often the conjoined twin of insecurity. What those writers wanted us to know, perhaps, was that this new work was the result of pure talent: Just think, audience, how good this would be if it were coupled with labor? If the piece stinks, it's simply a matter of timing. It's not my fault. I could do better, really, I could. I just didn't have the time.
Graduate students are frequent offenders on that count, but they aren't the only ones. I've seen name-brand, best-selling authors pull the same trick. I guess they think they can get away with not having to work too hard, enjoying an adoring and captive audience and all. But authors who are good and successful readers know that people have gone out of their way to see them. Like all performers, they know better than to risk disappointing the fans.
Most academics don't present hastily written papers. But they do something almost as bad. They read their papers aloud. Some professors read their lectures. It's common practice, I know, but frankly, it bugs me. It's hard enough for an audience to follow a short story, where, presumably, some attention is being paid to crafting narrative tension. Having to track audibly an argument written in long, convoluted sentences and leaden, jargon-ridden prose can feel like a forced drowning.
There's a hard balance between making oneself clear and understandable while presenting a complicated and nuanced argument, and not boring the audience to cuticle-picking distraction. The better talks are ones in which the author says, Here's what I wrote in the paper, and then summarizes and, well, presents. I can always read the paper myself later.
PowerPoint has made things better and worse. It can be a tool that does wonders for orienting the audience, with each slide providing a jumping-off point for an explanation. But too often I've watched people read their slides off the screen—the same slides we are all reading.
I want explication. I do not want to be read to. I always wonder if it's just me, but when I check with others—more attentive people—they say the same thing. They listen for the gist, and know that they'll get the details, if they care enough, later.
Reading instead of presenting is, I think, the academic equivalent of "I just dashed this off last night." It's an act borne out of (choose as many as apply): fear, insecurity, arrogance, procrastination, habit, poor training, or lack of regard for the audience. It's also just plain lazy. It's a lot of work to think something through and then write it out as a conference paper. Taking the next step—understanding what you've done and figuring out how to summarize it extemporaneously—seems to be one that many are willing to forsake.
Stanley Fish is one of the few people I know who can speak in paragraphs that spring like Athena—beautiful, fully formed as well as armed—from his head. Most of us can't. But does that mean we shouldn't even try? Or teach graduate students that this is a skill they might need when giving job talks or conference papers? The most memorable academic talks I've seen—and I've seen a lot—were all delivered and not read.
Why can't we aspire to that? What does it really entail? An understanding that if you want to be effective as a public speaker, you have to care about what the audience wants and needs. You need to master your material so completely that you are confident that you will get it right. And you must be willing to follow the directions on how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice.
Think about the academics you know who have become public intellectuals. You may not like them. You may dismiss them as "popularizers" (gasp!). You may, in fact, be intensely jealous of them. But no matter. Ask yourself: How many of them read their talks?
What is at stake here is not just doing our (teaching) jobs more effectively, but being part of a national conversation, and not ceding the ground to professional politicians and sophists. If we can't learn how to communicate complicated and important ideas in appealing and convincing ways, how can we hope to ever reach beyond academe? How, indeed, can we even reach our students and academic peers?
It's always tempting to try to make a pre-emptive excuse for not doing a better job at something. Indeed, if I'd only had more time, this column could have been great.
Comments
1. ksledge - August 03, 2009 at 08:51 am
Speakers in the humanities need to take a lesson from science. At least in my field, no one ever reads a paper for a presentation. Our powerpoints tend not to have a lot of words except on the "outline" page. They have figures instead. I know the subject matter makes it easier for us to present good talks, but I'm still always surprised to hear about how horrendous the norm is for talks in the humanities.
2. smstreet - August 03, 2009 at 09:28 am
Here's a summary of the comment I'd have written if I had more time: amen.
3. chuckkle - August 03, 2009 at 10:31 am
Perhaps the problem is delivery. If speakers thought of themselves as "performing" their presentations and worked on the skills to do that, theyh'd probably do a much better job. I've attended conferences in Theatre/Drama studies and Performance Studies in which almost all the talks were skilled, interesting, and cleverly presented. CHUCK KLEINHANS
4. janewales - August 03, 2009 at 11:11 am
I too hate to sit through the reading of a paper written with no regard to a listening audience-- but I think I know why that paper is so laborious, and why its presenter is so reluctant to engage. In my field at least, many people will assume that if a paper is accessible, it must be superficial-- "If I can understand it, s/he can't be all that bright." It's the fear of being thought a lightweight (on both sides, really-- that is, the audience also lacks the nerve to praise an accessible paper).
5. 12052592 - August 03, 2009 at 11:21 am
Thank you for writing this.
6. jmb5b - August 03, 2009 at 11:56 am
"I just wrote this last night" should not be used to excuse a sloppy presentation. However, it is also not the damning phrase that the author suggests. Conferences and academic meetings are not simply places to display finished academic work; they are also places where works-in-progress can be be discussed among academic colleagues. Probably my most successful presentation was written the previous night in a hotel room; when I presented it the next morning the response was so positive that it inspired me to submit it to a leading academic journal in the field, where it was later published.
7. flared0ne - August 03, 2009 at 01:14 pm
The most successful teachers (read "considered to be dynamic, insightful, and effective at communicating knowledge") tend to be those who understand that ALL teaching degrees should include a secondary major in performance art -- "performance", where "practice, practice" is king, and "art" as in "live and breathe your content, make it your own so you CAN give it away". Believing that your content alone will "carry" your message will yield a disappointing experience for all involved -- a strong, practiced sense of timing (and for after-presentation discussion a firm grasp of extemporaneous public speaking, for those "adhoc moments" when a particularly cogent question brings the potential for additional illumination) should be a foundation element of any presentation, or teaching plan, for anyone past about the third grade.
8. drummer - August 03, 2009 at 02:32 pm
I have been working on this reply for months: Nicely done. Thanks.
9. scpeters - August 03, 2009 at 03:01 pm
Generally I agree with you; however, at a conference I attended in June where there were presentations from both graduate students and professors, it was interesting to note that the presentations from the academic professionals were much more engaging when they were presentations, not read papers. But for the graduate students, the opposite was true. The presentations where a student summarized their research, even with the help of multimedia, were much more painful to sit through than ones where the student read a paper. I suspect performance has much to do with this, but I also wonder whether reading a prepared paper might not be useful as a learning experience in giving presentations.
10. mattfinish - August 03, 2009 at 04:02 pm
"I just wrote this last night" -- I agree with jmb5b; on occasion, saying this can be a way of bringing the audience in on the spontaneity and flow of process. I lead an extemporaneous writing workshop, and it's amazing how much of the writing simply works, and needs little or no edting. There is a way to share this with an audience and be modest, as in "Can you believe how lucky I was, that it came out all right on the first try?" Saying it in a "Check out how awesome I am!" tone is of course not very charming.
11. ef1901 - August 03, 2009 at 04:27 pm
Until I got to graduate school, I had never heard of people valuing a "read" paper over a presented one. But from what I can see, that's the standard, expected mode of presentation. I remember one time, at an informal lunch discussion, a professor read a paper, and another professor commented, "A whole paper to be read to us! That's a hard act to follow." I'm presenting myself for the first time this fall, and while I tend to rebel against the reading style of these presentations, I've never seen anyone do it otherwise.
12. ccherry - August 03, 2009 at 04:37 pm
Yes, they are lying. "Wrote it last night" is a hedge. If the paper's good, you're supposed to be that much more impressed that they "wrote it last night." If bad, your sympathy is expected and you aren't supposed to judge them as critically.
13. ledzep - August 03, 2009 at 05:12 pm
A grad student conference I participated in specifically requested that we present, rather than read our papers. This was almost universally ignored. Why? While a good presentation is far superior to almost any reading of a paper, a bad presentation is potentially a complete disaster, far worse than the reliable mediocrity of a basically competent reader. I have seen this not only in the case of grad students, but at least once from a "superstar" in my discipline. Nor do these train wreck presentations always involve PowerPoint, though I guess that they often do. It makes quite a bit of sense, really. The worst that will happen if you read, so long as you speak up, enunciate, don't have too long of a paper, etc., is that people will be bored. Particularly for grad students, at crunch time the prospect of getting through the event with no other bad consequences other than audience boredom seems almost golden. Whereas losing one's train of thought completely in the middle of a presentation, or over-summarizing and compulsize following-up and paraphrasing of side points as they occur in real time, can result in total disaster, or at least in a failure to get through the key material.
14. maxbini - August 03, 2009 at 08:44 pm
Thanks Rachel. Not only well written but honest, insightful and helpful. The lecturers I admired as a student and the few papers I have enjoyed listening to have the same thing in common - they were knowledgable and engaging and not in the least pedantic. Maybe the mistake is in confusing the paper one is seeking to publish with the presentation one should be performing. I was once an engaging philosophy tutor and when it came to lecturing I assumed that I had to step it up and presented full lectures in powerpoint which I mainly read from (but would interject the slides with elaborations or questions). Student evaluations were always pretty good but I knew something was missing - now I realise what it was. Thanks again.
15. kunsthistorikerin - August 03, 2009 at 11:41 pm
In my field, everyone reads their papers -- our standard format is a 20-minute conference paper, read out loud together with a powerpoint presentation. The thing is, when you watch the really good speakers, you realize that papers to be read aloud at conferences should be written differently than papers to be printed in journals. Sentences should be short and punchy. Ideas should be presented clearly. Language must be kept clear and precise -- sometimes it's elegant too, but clear and precise are far more important. I like to think a good read-aloud paper is written like a script; it is performed like reader's theater. It is practiced multiple times. It fits exactly into the alloted time. It matches with a well-planned powerpoint presentation, which has been checked and re-checked ahead of time. When I go to conferences, I practice until I know the paper *almost* by heart -- but I see no shame in taking my script with me, so that I can focus on the performance without having to struggle to find just the right words.
16. waldo2384 - August 05, 2009 at 06:23 pm
How can so many people who lecture for a living be so bad at it?
17. rjr8222 - August 15, 2009 at 01:52 pm
I agree with ksledge - the notion that academic presentations are to be read, not given, seems to be the fashion in some fields, not others. I once attended a scientific conference that included a speaker from the humanities. When it came time for her talk, I was stunned to watch her read, while seated, from a paper document. "What's with this goofy performance?" I whispered to the person next to me. "Oh, that's just the way they do it in the humanities," my more knowledgeable companion responded. My reaction was, "Good grief. Why?!" That's still my reaction. Why? Why would an entire field adopt such an ineffective communication style?