Laurie’s post on “The Worst Lecture in the World” brought to mind three dozen episodes of excruciating second-counting — chilly classrooms at 8 p.m., colleagues squirming in seats and trading irritable glances, 55 minutes in and no sign of wrap-up…
Those are guest lectures which often are expected to last for an hour, but the run-on happens on conference panels, too. A four-person panel scheduled for an hour and 15 minutes allots each person at most 15 minutes to speak and the audience 15 minutes for Q & A. But I’ve attended more sessions at which at least one person exceeded the limit than I have sessions at which everyone observed it. Overtime is the norm.
I did it myself in my first panel back in 1992, a philosophy and literature conference at Berkeley. Only halfway into my brilliant argument I’d already run over. The panel chair gave me one more minute, then cut me off in mid-sentence. He’d arrived five minutes late and spent five minutes outlining the session topic, then introduced the panelists with one sentence and a perfunctory nod, but he was flat right to jump in and retire me. It was embarrassing enough to deliver a lasting message. “Always end a few minutes before you’re supposed to,” I decided.
For one thing, everyone else likes you. It gives other panelists more time for their own thing, and it pleases audience members eager to ask questions. It lightens the pressure on you to approach the event as if you had to fill up the 15 minutes as a sign of how much you have to say. Many people assume that coming in short of the time slot signifies a deficiency in their learning and competence.
It affects young people the most. I was on an MLA panel several years ago with a full prof and two graduate students. The students went first, and 45 minutes later I took the podium to speak for seven minutes and the other prof went for five. We weren’t annoyed, though — why get angry at grad students who may be at their first MLA, or who may be on the job market and are anxious to show a hiring committee member in the audience how learned and acute they are?
But it is baffling to see experienced professors on conference panels running several minutes over. Why don’t they just identify a point or issue or distinction and sit down? They have 15 minutes at most, and 12 works better. That pretty much allows each panelist only enough room to pose a question or take a position on something. Not much nuance, not much subtlety, only one or two finer assertions.
And why fill that brief opening by actually reading words off a page? How refreshing it is to hear an academic speak in the conversational mode, not the lectern mode. This should be an occasion for exchange, debate, give-and-take, not one person’s display. A conference presentation with eyes downward, moving at the pace of the printed word, loses auditors.
One might draw a lesson in forensics: if you can’t expound your point by word of mouth, if you have to read it in paragraph form, then you have overwrought it. Bring it down. Don’t try to articulate all you know. Give the audience one thing to digest. Simplify, simplify.
