Preparing your PCA Presentation—The Mathy Stuff

Special Thanks to Jim Okapal for sharing this information!

It’s that time of year again. You’re beginning to write (or beginning to think about beginning to write) your presentation for the upcoming PCA conference. For those of you who write your presentation as a paper, how much material can you get through in the time allotted on a four-person panel? Here are some guidelines.

Conference session are 90 minutes long with four presenters and a 30-minute Q&A. In other words, on an idealized and typical panel, you have 15 minutes to present your ideas.

But, that’s a lie!

You don’t actually have 15 minutes. First, there is the transition from the previous speaker, adjusting your computer, ensuring that all the tech is working, and so on. That takes about a minute. Furthermore, most of us while presenting include asides, pauses, ummms, aahhs, and other verbal ticks while presenting that usually take up around 2 minutes of presentation time. So, now we have lost 3 minutes of the presentation time leaving us with only 12 minutes to inform the world of our galaxy-shattering important insights.

How does 12 minutes of presentation time translate into words-on-a-page? The average number of words that we say while speaking is 200 words a minute. Multiply that by 12 minutes and you get a 2400-word paper. If you double space your paper, use 1” margins, and one of the usual suspects in terms of fonts, you get about 300 words per page. 2400 words divided by 300 words gives us 8 pages of written material that you can get through in a presentation. You read that correctly—an 8 page paper is all you could reasonably read, word for word, in the allotted presentation time.

But this is the PCA. We love our audio-visual clips. When someone else is speaking, singing, screaming (I see those of you who present in Monsters …, Horror …, and Vampires …), dancing, brooding, or otherwise taking up time, that means YOU aren’t speaking. So, for every 1 minute of audio-visual content, you should expect to lose 300 words of your paper (because you have to get the av working properly and then transition back to your written text). So, for example, I used two video clips in a recent PCA presentation so I lost 600 words of text that I could reasonably cover in the presentation reducing me to only 1800 words or a 6-page paper. Considering that the original text was 7500 words long, I had a lot of cutting to do.

Here then, is a rough breakdown of what I could do in my paper:

• Intro (300 words) Topic & thesis
• Method and material (300 words) Brief description of the interpretive lens
• Summary of argument (150 words) Premises primarily
• Video (2 minutes or »  600 words)
• Analysis of video as evidence for premises (750 words)
• Overview of missing pieces from longer paper (150 words)
• Conclusion (150 words)

If that seems like almost nothing in terms of professional writing, you’re right. When I write book reviews, they are between 2000 and 2500 words long and my articles and chapters have been known to run over 30 pages or 9000 words. But remember, you are not trying to get every piece of information to the audience at a PCA presentation. You are baiting a hook. If someone bites, they will ask you questions during Q&A, seek you out after the session for more discussion, give you suggestions on what to cover in a longer version, discover synergies with the other presenters on your panel, and maybe some of those who are hooked turn in to friends or suggest future fruitful professional collaborations.

The PCA is a place to share ideas, make friends, and celebrate popular culture. To do that and to have a great paper, a great panel, a great area, and a great organization, we have to start with respect for our fellow pop and American culture enthusiasts. And that respect begins with having a presentation of the appropriate length so three other people can share their ideas and audience participation can occur. When we all create our work with such mutual respect in mind, it strengthens the community as a whole.

Jim Okapal

Chair, Governing Board of the PCA

Chair, Ethics Committee

Nerd

Geek

Professor

Philosopher

and overly pedantic keeper of the time ….

Please click the images below to access the Membership Matters video (and PowerPoint) where Jim presented this information.