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We touched on this seven years ago, and a current grad student, Sean, asked that I re-open it for discussion about what changes, if any, have take place in the intervening years. Thoughts from readers?
It is commonplace in philosophy of science circles and at philosophy of science conferences to use powerpoint. One stands out if one does not use it in these settings. But I think powerpoint does not suit all types of philosophy. Further, there are good and bad powerpoint presentations.
In 2008 I was invited to give a talk at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. On my first day I met a PhD student in the Department of Psychology and was introduced as the philosopher giving the talk later that week. He looked me in the eye and said something like "I f***ing hate philosophers. Are you going to sit there and read off the f***ing paper? I f***ing hate those talks. If you do that, I won't go.". Although I was a little taken aback by his rudeness, the message stuck. I went away, threw my paper in the bin, and for the first time gave a talk entirely without paper notes. After my talk I was told I was one of the very few philosophers with whom the psychologists had felt able to engage. Shortly after I was offered a job.
More and more, philosophers of mind take part of their task to be engaging with relevant issues – and researchers – in the cognitive sciences. The moral of the above is, I think, is that for any philosopher hoping to be taken seriously by those working in this field, reading off the paper is simply no longer an option. Having spent the last four years working in a psychology department, I can vouch that nothing turns that audience off as quickly as a philosopher reading a talk.
I'd add that the argument from detail is no longer an adequate justification for reading a talk. Any key claims be perfectly well be articulated in a PowerPoint presentation – either in the notes section or on the slide itself. (Of course, when a speaker simply cut-and-pastes a whole paper onto a densely-packed set of black and white text-only slides, it doesn't go down much better than if they had simply read from the sheet.)
One thing that I've noticed a lot more of recently is people presenting their papers by talking through power point slide presentations (with mixed results). But the prevalence of this varies widely by the speaker's area of interest. From what I've seen, ppt is pretty much the norm among people talking about empirical issues in the philosophy of mind, and quite common in social and political philosophy, whereas in the history of philosophy reading one's paper aloud (usually-ugh-word for word) is still most common. The obvious explanation here is the influence of disciplines like psychology and economics where ppt is the norm, but I don't know if that's true.
in robert richardson's biography of emerson he describes a harsh negative review emerson wrote of the commencement address one of his own brothers delivered. 'the speaker's great error, said waldo, was in taking his audience for granted, in assuming the listeners were interested in him, instead of assuming that it was his job to interest them… "instead, therefore of feeling that the audience was an object of attention from him, he [charles, the brother] felt that he was an object of attention from the audience."' (p. 39)
some of the best philosophy talks i've ever heard—e.g. avner baz talking, paper-free, through the arguments of his then-forthcoming book on ordinary language philosophy, adam morton talking through in-progress research on the emotions, ken manders arguing for attention to mathematical practice via the example of knots, and nancy cartwright's presidential address, 'how to do things with causes'—clearly aimed to convince their audiences of something. and each speaker clearly had in mind a conception of the audience, according to which what they had to say mattered.
Good talks are typically better than good readings. And bad readings are typically better than bad talks.
I think reading out loud is getting less common. And not a moment too soon! I've never followed much of a paper that was read out loud, and I doubt that I'm very unique in this respect. (There are tales of papers being read beautifully, engendering widespread understanding in the audience. There are also tales of bigfoot!)
The older I get, the less I read straight off; at first, I was moved by arguments that people vary with respect to ability to learn via audio, and later, my own decreasing hearing increased my interest in the accessibility of read-only presentations. (Any visual is helpful to those of us whose hearing is imperfect, so ppt and handouts are most welcome!) I believe that raised awareness of disability and increasing comfort with technological alternatives are helping along the reduction of reading-only. And like many who do interdisciplinary presentations, I find that interdisciplinary audiences prefer more interpersonally engaged addresses.
In my grad program, we're being instructed to never, ever merely read one's paper but always to do some sort of presentation, whether that is talking through the paper with a handout or a powerpoint.
Powerpoint is also useful when you are presenting a paper to an audience in which many people do not speak English as their first language (assuming you are presenting in English). The right choice of words on the screen can help an audience member follow the presentation, especially if your pronunciation of certain words is idiosyncratic (due to an accent, or what have you).
I'm with Fritz — there's nothing worse than a bad talk. And nothing more common than a bad talk-giver who thinks he's a good one.
What Fritz said.
Slightly off topic, but whether you're reading or talking through a ppt or handout, can we please all agree that we will spend a few minutes at the start *motivating* our talk. Don't just assume that your audience members (which typically include early grad students and often undergrads) both know your subtopic's minutiae and think it's as important as you do. You must believe it's important to have spent so much time on it–can you help us believe it too?
And (making no claims about whether it works from the outside) I use ppt but also write out my talk and have it there in 14 pt font to read as needed (with marks for advancing slides). Typically, I end up talking through most of it, but having written it out helps a lot.
I also think a good handout can be very useful.
I have rarely attended a talk/paper where I thought the presentation could have been improved if the speaker had simply read a prepared paper. I have regularly attended talks/papers where I thought the presentation could've been improved if the speaker had NOT simply read a prepared paper.
The move to powerpoint in my field (Phil Sci) has had the very positive effect of putting an end to paper reading, but it has had the very negative effect of creating the expectation that everyone will use ppt. Some people lack the computer skills to make a nice presentation. But, more importantly, others lack the communicative style amenable to overhead slides.
A common occurrence, as others have noted above, is for folks to 'talk through' some slides that contain the bones of the argument. Often this doesn't quite work. Presenters seem constrained by the format, unable to really 'wing it' because they have to cover things in the order of the slides, and because what they say has to make some sense of the words on the screen. The solution for these types of talk-givers would seem to be to forget the ppt and simply talk in a loosely-structured way. A handout with a few things that you know you'll cover will do the trick. For yourself, have a list of points you'd like to make.
I recently saw a veteran Darwin scholar give a captivating talk in exactly this way. The handout had a collection of points, in roughly the order the speaker wanted to cover them. And the speaker had a list of about 5 things he wanted to cover in the 30 minutes. He had no slides but nobody seemed to mind. In fact, people seemed to pay more attention because they were not trying to simultaneously look at the slides, listen to the speaker, and connect the two together. If the speaker was having trouble getting the detail or nuance of a point, or if there was tricky terminology, we were referred to the handout. (Note also that in a ppt talk your eye is drawn to each slide change. It's inevitable. You pay attention to the screen whether you want to or not. With a handout, you'll only glance down when prompted (or when bored, or doodling, or whatever)).
What Fritz, Tom and Eddy said. I don't have anything to add to what these guys have said, except to recommend Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 PowerPoint Rule to philosophers for conference/seminar presentations:
10: no more than 10 slides
20: speak for no longer than 20 minutes
30: minimum 30 point font size, (roughly 30 words per slide, 300 in total).
If you are used to wordy slides, you can simply say them. In PowerPoint, 'Presenter View' can help with this (slide show tab), although two screens are needed to use it (book a seminar room in your department).
I notice philosophers who use PowerPoint at conferences usually begin their presentation with a table of contents slide, which is frankly dulling, unless you are giving a 1 hour presentation. Don't bother telling your audience what they are going to be hearing anyway. I think images are still not widely used in philosophy and humanities presentations, which is a shame, since they can elicit an immediate emotional response from your audience.
BL COMMENT: I'll just say this seems to me very bad advice. Some (probably most interesting) philosophical arguments take longer than 20 minutes to develop.
As a grad student I always preferred talks by psychologists or empirically-minded philosophers (Haidt and Doris are two examples). They never read papers and were quite easy to follow. Indeed they were far easier to follow than the talks by philosophers who read papers, despite my being far more familiar with philosophy than psychology.
I think there should be A LOT less reading of papers. True this practice will result in some talks being worse than they would have been if the presenter just read the paper. No one will get better at this without practice. Of course grad students presenting for the first time might be wise to just read.
Also I think Eddy's "off topic" point is an incredibly important one and hope many will follow his advice.
Most philosophy conference oral presentations I have seen from conference CFPs are pegged at 20 minutes (e.g., sometimes 15 minutes for interdisciplinary conferences (e.g., ASSC 18: 15 minutes for presenting, 5 minutes Q&A) or scientific conferences if you are presenting data. The point is not to focus on presenting too much detail. Leave that for discussion with delegates during coffee breaks, or in your paper or monograph.
Every philosopher should be trained to deliver a philosophy presentation in 20 minutes, or less. If you cannot develop your argument(s) in that time, and make them even a little interesting, you simply need training to prepare highly condensed forms of your arguments without getting lost in too much detail. It is a basic academic skill for scholars in the 21st century. Besides, why shouldn't philosophy be presented in highly condensed form? It worked for Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, didn't it?
BL COMMENT: This involves a misunderstanding of Nietzsche, but we can put that to one side! Most good philosophy talks I have attended are in the 40-50-minute range. Some have been read, some presented with power point, some talked, but without power point. I can think of no reason why 20 minutes should be thought an ideal regardless of subject, that seems arbitrary and pointless.
I talked through the same paper via powerpoint for a job talk at two institutions with a similar institutional and faculty profile. My experiences were drastically different. At the first institution (where I am now) I was praised repeatedly for the style of the talk, the accessibility to students in the audience, and the powerpoint presentation itself. At the second institution, they hated it. I gave the talk on the first night and was repeatedly badgered about why I chose to do a presentation – in the car to breakfast, at breakfast, literally the whole day. No one questioned the content of the talk. They just couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that I presented the paper rather than read it. I even had the written version printed and available to them. Now when I give a talk, I ask ahead of time by saying something like "Do you mind if I give a presentation or would you prefer that I read the paper?" No problems since then.
Two thoughts, coming from a science/philosophy of science background and acknowledging that not all lessons may transfer:
(1) It's one thing to read your talk; it's quite another to take a paper written with the intention of being read, and just read that aloud. Verbal communication needs to be thought of and structured differently, to allow for the fact that your audience can't read at its own pace, can't go back up the text to be reminded of things, and so on. So even if you've written a great paper, you need to prepare a talk *from* that paper and not just read it out. If the talk is itself something that you've got written out verbatim, that's just a matter of presentational style – it works for some people.
(2) Powerpoint, or any such presentation, should be in your talk because you need it for some communicative purpose. It's not there to act as your own aide memoire (make notes instead); each slide should be in your presentation because it's adding something to that presentation over and above you just talking. (So text-filled slides are unlikely to be a good idea in most cases.) I tend to use the rule of thumb that if my slides would make sense if read by themselves, I'm doing it wrong.
A corollary of (1) and (2) is that "reading out" and "using powerpoint" are not mutually exclusive. I've given talks using neither; in principle someone could give a talk using both.
Great idea to ask for a preference (when applicable).
"Good talk" seems equivocal between "good TALK" versus "good CONTENT, presented in a talk." It seems some people cannot access the content unless it is a good TALK (i.e., presented in a lively, engaging way). I myself am not like that, so I care more about whether it is good CONTENT. And other things equal, reading the paper is superior on that count.
I might add that I am very upset by the lack of care, rigor, etc., in many phil mind talks…even though they may be good TALKs.
Whether you decide to read or talk your paper you need to have good visual aids — a power point presentation or a handout — and you need to practice your presentation out loud in advance, preferably multiple times.
You'll find most advertised philosophy conference CFPs are for 15-20 minute oral presentations, so it is reasonable to expect to learn to present well within that range (for conferences). This seems conventional in other academic disciplines as well. Departmental seminars in philosophy typically involve much longer presentation time (up to 1 hour) and Q&A (up to 1 hour), and philosophers need more skill and experience to handle these well.
I would say it's fairly obvious you should give a lively, dynamic talk rather than just read a paper, just as you should present something ambitious and brilliantly original, rather than something that is narrowly technical and relatively unoriginal. We should also exercise regularly and eat a perfectly balanced diet that contains no junk food. But the question is, given the limited time and intellectual energy most of us have, where should we focus our resources? Where there are trade-offs to be made, I would rather have someone work on the cogency of their arguments and the originality of their ideas, even if that means reading the paper, than have them spend hours memorising and practising in front of the mirror, just to dynamically present an uninteresting argument. I also think we need to be much more forgiving of grad students and junior faculty. Being a good presenter generally is the bi-product of years of teaching experience, I would say.
It might be helpful to distinguish between the style in which one presents (e.g. reading or not reading…something) and then, the particular performance we often see in philosophy typically associated with that former style: That "something" a philosopher reading is what essentially amounts to a journal article, section for section verbatim as submitted, without altering for time constraints, clearly not having practiced the presentation, or giving much thought to venue, motivation, or connecting with the audience.
Many have voiced a strong preference against "reading". But perhaps the preference actually tracks some of these other features typically associated with that performance. In other words, it might just be that "reading papers" over say, reading..notes or text of a specifically crafted presentation based on a submission..is sometimes such a bummer because philosophers typically do that when they invest zero time making a presentation other than printing out their submission.
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