In an ideal world, whenever I was invited to give a talk or a lecture, it would go something like this:
I would spend a few weeks thinking about what I wanted to say. After a sufficient percolation period, I would sit at my computer and sweat out a complete draft.
Then I would spend months revising it, shoring up the structure, getting rid of ideas that didn’t fit, and dumping whatever seemed extraneous. I would add anecdotes, vivid images, and sparkling, funny phrases. I would hunt down -ly adverbs that seemed weak or lazy, and go on a search-and-destroy mission for needless this, that’s, and there’s. Finally, having driven myself crazy with perfectionist anxiety, I would tell myself I was ready.
Once I arrived at the destination of my talk, I would be put up in a hotel with 7,000-thread-count sheets, pounds of hand-dipped chocolates on the pillows, and a terrace that afforded me easy access to 86-degree weather. I would have finally acquired clothes that are flattering and comfortable. I’d look fabulous and feel confident that I had come up with a talk that conveyed exactly what I wanted to say in clear, compelling, and sometimes even funny sentences.
When the time came, with smooth hair and in powerful chunky heels, I would stand at the podium and read my talk.
Yes, people, in my fantasy world, I would read aloud my carefully crafted talk. I would do so even though I’m not a great reader—I don’t have Scarlett Johansson’s voice or Meryl Streep’s ability to inflect a comma with meaning. As I read, I might occasionally glance up at the end of a memorized sentence, and at that point I might see some people dozing and others playing Words With Friends. Undaunted, I would lower my head back and keep reading every word as written.
Afterward people would swoon. Women would want to be my best friends and men would want to date me. I would be offered an endowed professorship with a multizillion-dollar signing bonus, and Helen, my dog, would get to lead a parade through the campus.
If I had my druthers, that’s how things would go. I would let myself care more about the information I had to present than I would about the experience of the audience who listened to me drone on. I would ignore how painful it is to hear to someone read her talk.
Because, friends, it is painful to be read to. Unless, of course, you’re in bed wearing footie pajamas, surrounded by stuffed animals, and the reader is your parent. After many years of going to academic conferences, sitting in job talks, and going to readings by literary prose writers and poets, I can tell you: I can’t abide hearing academics read their work to an audience.
In some disciplines (and classrooms), it is common practice for people to read their talks. This is unfortunate. I know why folks do it. They do it for the same reasons that, in my ideal world, I would read my talk. When called on to speak to a room of my peers (or betters), I get stomach-flopping nervous. I forget things. I am less fluent and much less fun in person than I am on the page. My speech stumbles and I suffer brain farts where I can’t remember what I wanted to say next, or what I’d just said.
For a while I tried using PowerPoint in my talks because I thought it would solve this problem for me. But my slides had too many words. In an effort to overhaul and make the presentation zippier, I added a bunch of images that I thought would be entertaining and funny. But my focus too often remained on images that made me comfortable, and not ones my audience needed in order to understand my message (even though Helen is an unusually photogenic dog).
My talks weren’t working. I knew that. I knew it because I’d been to many talks just like mine.
I told myself that at least my writing was lively. But the truth is, even when lectures are well crafted, I still find it hard to listen. If something has been written, I’d rather read it myself. I know how to read and like to be able to take my time, rereading when I get interested in thorny ideas or lingering over a particularly pleasing sentence. When I attend a lecture, I want the speaker to, well, speak to me. She won’t know if I’m confused, sleeping, or rapt if she doesn’t glance away from her pages. If I’m sleeping, I’d like her, please, to wake me up.
As I was thinking about this, I realized the problem isn’t just one of presentation. Reading a talk of scripted speech is a physical manifestation of the fatal flaw of much scholarly prose: Too many academic writers stop thinking about the readers. They concentrate on what they’ve researched, uncovered, or analyzed and forget to reach out to those they need to win over to show why their findings matter.
I’ve been saying that, Cassandra-like, for many years in The Chronicle and elsewhere. And so, I decided I had to talk my talk. I’d been asked to give a keynote speech at a conference and knew exactly what I had to say: If you want to get published, you have to think about the reader. How could I spout that idea in front an audience of hopeful academic authors with my head down and my eyes locked on pages I’d spent months crafting, droning on in a voice that would soon start to sound like cats in heat? If I believed academic writers needed to be more mindful of their readers, then as a speaker I needed to think about my listeners.
To prepare, I started with an old PowerPoint outline and wrote an entire draft in a way that sounded breezy and conversational. When I tried to distill those pages into notes they became so detailed and involved—and stilted and formal—that I ended up writing the whole thing out again, trying to sound like a human.
I went back and forth between prose and bullet points about 50 times. I knew that I would end up uttering sentences that trailed off; that I would repeat words, phrases, and ideas; that I’d say “um” and “like” too much. While there are people whose thoughts come out in complete and beautiful paragraphs, sadly, I am not one of them. I had to tell myself that that was OK. If I really gave folks good information, they would forgive me an “um” or three.
But doing handsprings without a mat was terrifying. I decided to create the briefest notes, store them on my phone, and whip it out only if I got desperate. I felt pretty darned panicky every time I thought about delivering this talk and knew that having my electronic blankie in my hand would reassure me. Plus, I thought it would make me look young.
Even though I was clear about what I wanted to say, I worried I would get distracted and go off on tangents. I worried that I would mess up the timing. I worried that my hair would look bad. I worried I’d be boring at best and incoherent at worst.
It went fine.
Of course I did go off on a riff and didn’t leave enough time for questions. But I only had to look at my phone once, to read George Orwell’s translation of a gorgeous verse of Ecclesiastes into hysterical academic prose. The audience seemed interested and engaged. Afterward people said nice things, and some fellow travelers showed me photos of their dogs.
The whole ordeal was a huge amount work, an energy drain, and the preparation cost me time I could have spent comfortably behind my computer writing things that would get published.
But the exercise, though painful, was an important reminder of my main message: If you want to get published, you have to write in a way that makes people want to read. And if you want anyone—students, peers, legislators, donors—to listen to you, you have to speak to them, not read to them.
Rachel Toor is an associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University’s writing program in Spokane. Her website is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com. Her first novel, On the Road to Find Out, was published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and she is now working on a book about rats.
