Getting geared up to go to Belgium later this month for a conference on Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics (for some reason, I find the lack of an "and" in the conference title kind of cool). Now that I'm no longer worrying about how I'm going to pay for the trip, I can spend some time productively--worrying about what I'm going to say. I've got a paper that's about 8500 words and I'm still fiddling with the conclusion, which will probably make it longer. I've got 20 minutes in which to deliver it. So I'm trying to figure out what can be cut out of the oral presentation. My subject is presidential inaugural addresses in Taiwan, so I figure I'm going to need to keep a lot of the background information in, otherwise the presentation will be incomprehensible to most of the people at the conference. I suppose I can keep my quotations from the inaugurals to a minimum (though that means my audience will miss out on the A-bian imitation I've been working on).
I think this will be a good experience, though, because it's one of those times where I'm talking about Taiwan to people who probably don't have more than a general knowledge about Taiwan and its history. I need more practice with that, I think. It'll be interesting to see how clear and meaningful I can make my presentation in terms of the conference's focus.
[Update, 4/18/05: I've managed to cut the paper down from 30 double-spaced pages to 15, by cutting out all the inaugural addresses except for those of the democratically elected presidents. The word count is reading 5,218 right now, but I think I need to cut out more. At the same time, I've got to make sure this thing still makes sense to people who don't know much about Taiwan's history...]
4 comments:
Of course, if you attend the SusanSinclairSchool of SpeedSpeech, you'll be able to give a 50-page talk in that time slot!
I'd try that, Susan, but when I talk too fast I tend to spit...
My brother suggested I just end by saying, "I'll let you draw your own conclusions." I have to admit that's becoming an attractive option.
You could always use the old Seinfled "yadda, yadda, yadda" to abbreviate things...
Hey, Heather, you were at my RSA presentation in 2002. Did it seem like I was spending most of the time giving background information? Felt like it... Felt like I spent most of the talk giving a lesson in the history of post WWII Taiwan. Hope my talk next week won't do that.
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