EXcellent

First paper run-through: 19 minutes and 52 seconds.

I am going to cut a bit more, but it's good to know it's a question of paring away the excess avoirdupois and not of figuring which limbs or bodily organs are most expendable.

(Yes, I present later today; but I still have a lot of time for practice before then. How far in advance of presentation would you ideally finish your paper? And how far in advance do you actually finish in practice?)

My conference work ethic was probably permanently maimed in grad school by 1) seeing lots of people present with hand-written emendations, often entailing paragraphs written on the back of a printed page and 2) even seeing a grad student I knew finish writing his conclusion during the presentations of the other speakers on his panel. Even though I knew darn well at the time that this was NOT the way to go - and was, in fact, pretty darn rude - it leaves a very different impression than, say, seeing everyone I know board the plane to Kzoo with a shiny finished polished paper gleaming in their briefcases. Which has never happened.

Is this just a Kzoo thing - a function of its unfortunate timing at the very end of most people's semesters? I've seen eminent senior-type folks harrumph that this last-minute finishing of papers has led to a terrible decline in quality of the papers at Kzoo. Said harrumphers, however, are usually tenured at R1 institutions with plenty of support to help them handle the grave burden of grading of their thirty-odd students for the term; the people I've seen finishing last minute - which is many; check out the computer center at Kzoo during the conference and count how many people are wearing conference badges! - are often untenured people teaching heavy loads who need the line on their c.v.* Whose papers have rarely seemed to me consistently weaker than those by the harrumphers.

*Although they really probably don't. Looking back, I'd have been better served going to Kzoo less and publishing more. The good thing about conferences is that they made me get something down on the page; if I have to stand up in front of strangers, I will get the writing done. The bad thing is not so much that the conferences really took time away from writing for publication, but that they made it easy to think I'd accomplished something simply by presenting (which I had, but nothing that makes up for not publishing more), and to be lazy about transforming the paper into an article. Yet, conversely, almost all the publications I have managed to produce have come from contacts I made on the conference circuit. So maybe it's really a wash in the end.

Comments

[Anastasia]

I do think it has to have something to do with the timing of the conference. our big conference is in november, so it's the middle of the fall semester. it's a bit inconvenient but it also means no one is in the midst of end of semester grading. I see a mix of polished and unpolished but I don't think I've seen anyone finishing during a presentation or anything like that. I can't think it has to do with people in my field being more conscientious or anything like that. I thin it's because you have your paper accepted in March and have all summer to get something on paper.

[styleygeek]

My own experiences of conferences, both here and internationally has been that there is always a relatively visible percentage of the speakers who are still preparing their talk right up until the last minute. I think at our big Australian conference, the last-minuters are maybe 1 in 5, partly because the conf is in a two week teaching break mid-semester, but even at confs where it's a smaller number, you notice them, because they are the ones running around asking where the printers are, or the photocopiers, or sitting tinkering with their own presentations when everyone else is going out for drinks.

[undine]

On a purely venal and selfish level, I'm relieved to see the lack of planning of people like the grad student you mentioned; it makes me feel as though whatever procrastination I've engaged in at least isn't THAT bad.