conference paper: minor but significant triumph
So I've been working on this conference paper, and it's been driving me nuts. The proposal I sent in is very smart, but gave me very little to work with in terms of setting up a step-by-step argument I can advance in under twenty minutes. So I've been sitting here, Mr. Earbrass-style (sans sherry), with a pile of slips of paper that say things like "historiographic metafiction" and "Derridean supplement" and "poststructuralism in the service of postcolonialism" and so on.
All of which has had me on the verge of tearing out my hair, because while I could write that paper in about four hours, and everybody in the audience would clap politely and probably not even complain about my highfalutin' theoryheadedness and my obfuscatory prose (phenomena to which we have all, as academics, become sadly inured), that is just not the paper I want to write. I speak academese as fluently as the next English PhD, but that shit is nobody's mother tongue, you know?
Anyway, just now as I sat here poking violently at slips of paper with my favorite green pen, the scales fell from my eyes and I saw what I need to do. Which is: explain my premise, and answer, as briefly and logically as possible, the two obvious questions that arise from that premise.
It's the same old thing that I have to keep realizing over and over again: The audience is on my side. They are not going to try to trip me up. They want me to be smart, yes, but more than that, they want me to make them feel smart. All I have to do is tell them an interesting story.
Bingo.
All of which has had me on the verge of tearing out my hair, because while I could write that paper in about four hours, and everybody in the audience would clap politely and probably not even complain about my highfalutin' theoryheadedness and my obfuscatory prose (phenomena to which we have all, as academics, become sadly inured), that is just not the paper I want to write. I speak academese as fluently as the next English PhD, but that shit is nobody's mother tongue, you know?
Anyway, just now as I sat here poking violently at slips of paper with my favorite green pen, the scales fell from my eyes and I saw what I need to do. Which is: explain my premise, and answer, as briefly and logically as possible, the two obvious questions that arise from that premise.
It's the same old thing that I have to keep realizing over and over again: The audience is on my side. They are not going to try to trip me up. They want me to be smart, yes, but more than that, they want me to make them feel smart. All I have to do is tell them an interesting story.
Bingo.