Angers, Loire Valley 2009

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Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2009
Views from France, Views Beyond the Mainstream

Guidelines

Format | Meet the Panel | Presenting your Paper | Circulating your Paper | Tips

Format of the Paper

Papers for the conference should be word-processed, 1.5 spaced and printed on A4 paper. They should not exceed 7-8,000 words in length, including footnotes and references.

Meet the Panel

If you have not met the other people on your panel before (including the Chair), please do make the effort to make contact with them and to check that they have arrived at the conference. Arrange a meeting in advance by email; if you are not familiar with the venue, you can arrange to rendezvous at the registration desk or at the entrance to the accommodation. Please feel free to check at the registration desk to see if they have arrived.

Presenting your Paper

The Research Sessions throughout the conference will be 90 minutes in length.

Paper-givers will have a maximum of 15 minutes each in which to make a short presentation of their paper at the conference. It is important that this time allocation is not exceeded as the presentation is intended as an introduction to the following discussion. It will not be possible to read the paper in the time available and all paper-givers should adequately prepare their presentation with this in mind.

As a courtesy, if you are presenting a paper, you should participate in some of the other research sessions.

Circulating your Paper

Making copies of your paper available to other delegates is an integral part of the research conference. If your paper is not ready before the conference, if you do not interact with other delegates and attend other research sessions, you will not derive much benefit from the conference.

It has not been unknown for some paper-givers to turn up at the conference just in time for their research panel, present their paper and then wonder why the audience is disinterested and lacking in enthusiasm. If you do not make your paper available, you are unlikely to receive any constructive feedback from the audience.

1. All paper-givers are expected to send via email, a copy of their paper to all others on their Panel, including the Panel Chair well in advance of the conference. Contact email addresses will appear on the conference website.

2. Paper-givers are asked to bring 10 or more copies of their paper to the conference, which should be presented upon arrival at the conference registration desk. These will be sold to other delegates for a small fee (funds raised go towards the UACES Student Fund). The sale of papers is also intended to prevent papers from being ‘collected’ en masse. If you object to your paper being sold in this way, or to buying papers, please feel free to obtain the papers via email directly from the author.

3. Other delegates may email you in advance of the conference, requesting a copy of your paper.

4. We will also publish papers to this website if they are supplied to us.

Tips for Presenting your Paper

The following tips have been included here because people often make the same mistakes.

1. It is very unlikely that the audience has read your paper beforehand; you want to convince them to leave the session and go read it! So keep your presentation short, lively, and well-focused.

2. Watch the time: limit your presentation to a maximum of 15 minutes. If have little experience of presenting, it is best to practice out loud beforehand, to ensure that you really will speak for no more than 15 minutes. Remember how many times you have been bored out of your mind, listening to someone who drones on and on … do not take such speakers as models!

3. Present only your key argument and/or points, illustrating with examples only if you can spare the time. You will not be able to cover all the points made in your paper, nor perhaps even most of them – but you will be able to give the audience a taste of your argument.

4. Do NOT read word-for-word from your paper. There are (as I see it) two main strategies for preparing the presentation: 1) you draw up a brief outline, only 1 or 2 pages long, in which you have bullet points besides the main points, and you speak to this outline; 2) you extract full sentences from your paper (either highlighting them in the paper itself, or transferring them to a new document), but you have virtually memorised them beforehand, so that you can engage with the audience as you speak rather than speak into your paper.

5. If you are going to use audiovisual aids, limit the overheads or slides you use. In a 15 minute presentation, four slides is probably a reasonable number (but use even fewer than this if you have a lot of information on each slide).

6. Try not to speak too fast or too slowly; avoid interrupting your speech with lots of ‘uhms’ and ‘erms’ (or even worse, ‘like’): this takes practice, of course – but also confidence in your argument. If you feel nervous (as we all do at least occasionally) imagine that you are in a debate with a close friend across the kitchen table, and try to convince them of your argument.