By Chong Bretillon
Academic conferences in the field of humanities are useful venues for sharing and circulating new ideas and testing out new concepts. Normally, scholars submit an abstract based on their current research, type up a 10-12 page essay to read to the audience in a 20-minute presentation, and then hope to incite discussion and gain feedback on their ideas. We are taught that conference presentations have value in that they ideally result in articles that you then submit for publication in high-quality peer-reviewed journals and volumes. Turning a conference paper into an article is a step-by-step process which involves understanding your readership— that is, by selecting the specific journal most likely to be interested in your argument and in which a conversation about your research question(s) exists. This is even more critical if the essay will appear in an edited volume or special themed issue of a journal, where the editors will most likely have specific expectations about audience, organization, and methodology.
Recently, I was invited to submit an article to a special issue of a journal— and it just so happened that I was working on a presentation for the same research project after having submitted an abstract a semester earlier to the regional conference in my field. Yet, instead of presenting first and writing a longer article later, I did the reverse. I needed to submit the article sooner, so I was already writing a 20-page article draft, but needed to condense, cut, and rework it into a 15-20 minute oral presentation. Although condensing seems easier than expanding — after all, cutting is easier than writing new material, it would seem — I found myself struggling with a process that was the reverse of what I was accustomed to doing.
I began to think about FOMO [fear of missing out]: the fear that my unknown audience of conference attendees will be missing out on some crucial ideas or language that the readers of my draft benefitted from reading.
The idea of FOMO can help writers with the process of condensing a longer piece of writing into a shorter one. First, in order to lessen your fears of leaving something out, it helps to clarify audience expectations. Am I writing for a wide audience? How familiar with my texts is my audience likely to be? In my case, since the panel was about a narrow topic, I figured that most attendees would have at least some familiarity with my topic, but not necessarily with my sources. Therefore, rather than include analyses from sources that I would need to extensively contextualize, and which would be difficult to understand if I dispensed with biographical and contextual information, I decided to go with the more familiar of the sources. This left room to perform deeper and more thorough close readings in the time allotted.
Secondly, I found the practice of reverse outlining to be extremely useful for condensing and reworking a long draft into a short paper. After a second reading of my article draft, I pared down the various threads of inquiry, eliminated the many and diverse citations and references, and shrunk the argument down. I focused primarily on clarity. In fact, it was helpful to go back to my original abstract, where I had outlined the overall scholarly conversation into which I hoped to enter, the main claim I was making, the texts I was using for my close readings, and finally, the contribution my essay was making to the burning questions in the field. What is an abstract if not a condensed article in itself?
In sum, I found that writing a conference paper based on a completed article draft actually helped my article: I saw my argument, however pared down in a new light. I still had some fear that my session attendees would miss out on a significant idea or point, but… that is what the question and answer period is for. :)
Published April 25, 2017
