One of the big differences between academics in the humanities and in the sciences is that, at professional meetings or during lectures, humanities scholars read aloud from a paper they are holding, while science people usually speak extemporaneously, though of course they surely outlined what they were going to say beforehand—or practiced their talk. But you almost never hear a scientist read a paper.
A colleague was complaining to me about this recently, and she had a point. Here the scientists clearly have an advantage, and for three reasons:
1.) If you’re just going to read your paper, why not just hand it out to the attendees, or put it online? What is to be gained by reading aloud what’s already written? This practice turns the speeches into what could be edited volumes, saving people a lot of time.
2.) Hearing a paper read out is, let’s face it, DEADLY BORING. Rarely is there any attempt to enliven the reading by changing pace, intonation, or other elements of speech. A science talk in which the speaker more or less talks to you as if talking to a friend or colleague is simply more interesting. Plus extemporaneous speech affords a chance for off-the-cuff remarks, humor, or other forms of rhetoric that characterize normal conversation.
3.) Let’s face it: written English is not the same as spoken English. This is particularly true in the humanities when papers are written in academic language, which is often deadly dull. Reading a paper uses a different form of speech than speaking extemporaneously, even if you use an outline.
Some caveats: the humanities scholar may say that it’s absolutely important to get the words right, ergo one has to have every word down on paper lest the audience misconstrue your ideas. But this exculpatory claim is unconvincing, for, after all, don’t scientists need to get the data right even more? To get around that need, we usually use Powerpoint (or 35 mm slides in the old days). But if you’ve listened to scientists who don’t use slides, they don’t read their talks either, and they’re more interesting. Further, can’t humanities people use Powerpoint? (If they did, they’d probably put the entire text of their talk on the slides!). They could simply put a few words on each slide to prompt them and to show the audience their main points, and then speak extemporaneously.
I realize that there are exceptions to this rule: humanities scholars who give good talks without reading (Dan Dennett is one) and scientists who simply read the text on their slides (names redacted), which is nearly as boring as hearing a paper. Still, this divide between humanities and sciences is something that irks me—and other people, too. I really do think that humanities people can pep up their talks by simply practicing them and/or using an outline that they can refer to from time to time.
Now I’m not trying to denigrate the humanities as a whole compared to science, but simply criticizing one difference between these areas that, I think, benefits internecine communication (and interest) more in the sciences than in the humanities.
If you can justify this difference, please do so below. But then you must explain to me why humanities people who read papers can’t simply make their papers available to the audience, either on dead-tree paper or online.
I think the relative importance of “what you say” (i.e. the content) compared to “how you say” is higher in science. This is not to say that “how you say” is not important in science or “what you say” is not important in humanities. But, a lot of times, the “form” can be even more important than the “content” in humanities which is rarely the case in science. This only partially explains the phenomenon. I do agree with your general sentiment.
I will also take the liberty to digress a bit and say that I never understood why written academic language has to be so different and so much more boring compared to spoken language. I understand the need for some amount of formality, but academic writing is often too dry and hard to follow. This is true for both science and humanities.
Agreed. There are a few scientists who wrote very clearly, though. Among them were my boss Dick Lewontin, as well as his Marxist-in-arms Steve Gould, and with Gould I’m talking about his scientific papers, not his Natural History columns. Also, although I often disagree with what he says, David Sloan Wilson is a very clear writer of scientific papers.
I completely agree that written and spoken language should not be all that different. Why is it? My pet hypothesis is that most kids in school are (or were in my day) taught to write as if they were auditioning to be the next Dickens or Hemingway or Orwell or Plath. That’s the stuff we read, so that’s the stuff we emulated. And in science, we were often trained to write in the third person, as if pretending we weren’t involved in the research would make it seem more objective. No one speaks like that. Surely, no one should write expository prose like that. My advisor and friend Steve Gould got away with it, but he was a rarity. Still, I sometimes rolled my eyes when reading one or another of his essays, as Gould seemed sometimes to write as much to impress as to communicate.
…as Gould seemed sometimes to write as much to impress as to communicate.
I quite agree. I thought that The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox was a dreadful book that exemplified this. It contained one feeble example of what was supposed to be a major theme, that art could illuminate science, and it was full of ramblings to show the reader how intellectual the author was. I was particularly incensed by Gould’s condescending explanations of the subjunctive mood.
I too would have preferred he hadn’t done that.
Plath or Dickens or Hemingway might be poor models for academic writers, but if we could all write as clearly as Orwell, scientific literature would be much less of a trial to read. His “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946, and in it he was primarily criticizing British political writing, but it’s still worth reading for his recommendations for writing clear, readable prose.
Some would argue that the highly stylized form of academic communication is followed in the interests of brevity and precision. Others argue that it is often used to exaggerate the sense of objectivity. I lean towards the latter.
Humanities conferences are elocution contests, it seems.
NOW a lot of things make sense. 😁😁
Interesting. I did not know that about humanities meetings…it made me realize that I guess that I have never been to one. I have spoken at K12 education conferences and noticed that a couple of times the person introducing a presenter did read the entire bio they had been given…which I thought both odd and extremely time consuming as opposed to picking a few key highlights which described the speaker’s general background.
Is this really true as a general rule? I guess I had heard the expression “read a paper”, but never thought to take it literally.
Yes, it’s true!
I find it odd that public talks also begin with a full recitation of the speaker’s academic CV. The audience does not know or care about obscure fellowships and other such titles. But some presenters are especially bad. I recall one who did not want to reveal what was in his book, because people were supposed to buy it.
At meetings of the Physikological Society it was – and I hope still is – forbidden to read a paper. Another strange difference in UK even at a multidisciplinary meeting, scientists stand up when they speak; historians sit down. As a consequence it is more difficult to hear the historian especially if given to mumbling. The explanation I was given was that historians don’t like to be seen talking down to people. My incredulity was evident.
In my experience, scientists are sometimes just as bad. Trust me, you don’t know what suffering is until you’ve sat through a mathematics seminar in which every slide is packed with equations. Now I like a nice equation as much as the next mathematician, but Euler, Laplace and all the other saints of mathematic preserve us from an hour of such tedium!
Ironically, the least boring mathematics seminar I ever attended was on the subject of tidal bores, the mini-tsunamis that race up an estuary ahead of the incoming tide when conditions are just right. The speaker showed just one equation at the start of his talk, and then entertained us with videos that he had taken of tidal bores around the world, including (from a helicopter!) the River Mersey where it narrows abruptly at Runcorn. I was a graduate student in the applied mathematics department at Liverpool University at the time, and it was a revelation to most of the audience that our local river had tidal bores.
I tread a middle ground. I would write up a “conversational” version of my paper and read that aloud. I was often nervous, and this helped ease things quite a bit. Of course, I used slides (in the old days, handouts). I’d provide a link to the online version of both the slides and the formal paper (though not the conversational version). I’m retired now, and no longer nervous! (My field is toward the “natural” end of the social sciences.)
I suspect that many people in the humanities and social sciences wonder about this practice as well, but custom is a powerful force.
It reminded me of an experience at my first job interview, a 1-year replacement position at a small liberal arts college that should probably remain nameless. The chair of the search committee called me before my visit, and said that my ‘job talk’ should be informal, not a paper read verbatim, so they could get a sense of what my teaching would be like. I did that, practicing for several hours beforehand to get it right. They hired someone else, and a guy on the faculty later told me that the search committee was surprised that I had not read a formal paper! When I said that the chair of the committee had told me to give a presentation that was more like a class lecture, he replied “you were set up…..” Turns out the search committee chair had a favorite candidate and wanted to stack the deck a bit in his favor. The major consolation was that the guy they hired for this 1-year replacement went from there to a 4th rate technical school in the rural south, a career path I would not have wanted….
That’s terrible!…though sadly, typical.
This sounds very similar to an experience I had interviewing for a tenure-track job about 25 years ago. I was instructed by the search committee chair to prepare a presentation of a research paper by someone else (as in your case, ostensibly to see how I would teach a topic outside my area). I picked a well-known paper and gave what I thought was a good exposition of it. After I didn’t get the job, I asked someone I knew on the committee for feedback and she told me the committee was surprised that I hadn’t presented my own research. It turned out the chair wanted a particular candidate and gave everyone different instructions.
I’m curious about whether this has always been the case, or whether the rise of critical or even identity theory has something to do with it. Just on the surface, humanities papers being read aloud reminds me of book readings, where an author goes to a library or store and carefully reads their new book to a rapt audience of perspective buyers. The prose is the point.
It also sounds a bit like what might be called performative introversion. Are they allowed to look up or will that fluster them and make them go back and start at the beginning again?
It’s been true for at least 30 years, I remember that long ago seeing the announcement of a religion & science type talk in the Comparative Religion dept of my uni, went to check it out and was aghast to find that I was being read to for 50 minutes.
At least 40 years. The first time I attended a talk where the presenter read the paper (badly), I stood up and walked out.
Probably the best take on this is Randy Olsen’s (and colleagues’) story-making approach to communications: a strategy for framing professional communications to a variety of audiences. Being read to is not a terrible thing, if the story is good, but this is not true of most academic papers. And, of course, the spoken word is (should be) organized, composed, and delivered in a different way. I think the difference may be that the “data” in many humanities papers are the words and how they are constructed into a whole. So, maybe there is a fear that a more extemporaneous delivery would inadvertently disrupt the finely-tuned construct?
Or, as is so often the case in the humanities, the finely-tuned deconstruction. 😉
When he was still a marine biology researcher Randy also gave fantastic conference talks.
At least in humanities like Philosophy, I think it makes some sense to read a paper, because they are presenting logical arguments, as opposed to data-based arguments.
Substantial amounts of Philosophy are dedicated to pinning down the exact meanings of words, and they are trained to seek logical flaws in arguments (and tacit assumptions that might not be satisfied, etc). If you’ve spent years getting your argument and wording just right in order to make a persuasive case, you don’t want to blow it all by speaking extemporaneously and using the wrong word or forgetting to mention a crucial detail.
But in social sciences like Economics, I don’t see why you would ever read a paper. Just present the Methods you used to get and analyse the data, and the results should mostly speak for themselves.
Dan Dennett was a philosopher, and he didn’t read papers. A simple outline should suffice, even for logical arguments or giving definitions.
Right, and I loved Dennett, but a lot of his work was never regarded as being as rigorous or well presented by other Philosophers of Biology as work by Sober, Godfrey-Smith, Griffiths, Sterelny, etc.
He makes his points well to a lay audience, but they generally get critiqued in the technical literature, which presumably is what most academic philosophers want to avoid when they’re presenting at a conference.
Well, I’d suggest that they use Powerpoint presentations. Who is going to pay attention to a deadly dull lecture? In philosophy, I’d suggest that it is the WRITINGS of the philosophers you name that has made them influential.
The spoken talk amounts to an overview of and advert for the written version. Yes it matters to get language precisely right in the written version, but it doesn’t matter (nearly as much) in the spoken version.
“If you cannot explain it to a barmaid, you do not understand it yourself.”
(attributed to William Thomson, Lord Kelvin)
Einstein said something similar.
I have a good friend who is an academic philosopher, now emerita. In her field it was standard practice to read papers. As I had a strong interest in the philosophy of science, I often attended talks by philosophers and struggled to follow them. I once suggested to my friend that she try giving a talk more informally and even add slides for illustration. At first, she was reluctant to do so—she did not yet have tenure—but she eventually gave it a try. It was a great success! Her thesis was so much easier to follow. Imagine listening to someone reading aloud a paper full of logic symbols and statistical equations. How can that possibly make sense?
I guess a lot depends on the historical culture of meetings. In my engineering discipline, we nominally were given a fifteen to twenty minute slot to present and maybe an additional 5-10 minutes for q&a. I always talked to slides: vu-graphs on overhead projector in the old days, then 35mm slides in a cassette, then power point presentations on a stick. I saw the talk as simply a hook baited with enough information and context for the listener to decide whether the work was relevant to his interests AND, if it were, entice him to read the longer and more complete paper or journal article. That could lead to an in person meeting or, in some cases, him first reading the yet longer and more complete NASA technical paper. Of course the conference paper, journal article, and NASA technical paper were all referenced in the talk and listed on the Summary slide.
The humanities are getting a beating these last few days. Oh, the humanity!
🙂
Here is an example of a Nobel Prize lecture using PowerPoint
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/goldin/lecture/
At Caltech the Watson Lectures I remember had slides.
Many science/engineering/math conferences have poster sessions.
My answer is that folks do what others are doing. I can see the lag in early users but surely nowadays folks want visual input in the presentation.
Comment by Greg Mayer
I am a scientist who reads my papers at meetings. I can’t recall exactly what I did in my very first delivered papers (I might have winged them from the slides), but my eventual technique was inspired by the late John Kirsch, director of the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum. For his class lectures, he wrote up a text in conversational style– i.e. it was written to be spoken aloud– printed it double spaced in a large font, and kept them in a 3-ring binder, which was in front of him as he delivered the lecture. Doug Futuyma also, at least sometimes, reads from a text at meetings. (Doug is a good writer.)
I write a conversational text in a large double spaced font, and include stage directions (such as when to change slides, where to point, motions to make, etc.). During the talk I slide each finished page to the left, so as to keep two pages visible to me, so I know where I’m going. (In the last few meetings I’ve been to, the podiums have been tiny, making it difficult to have two pages visible.) In delivering the talk, I don’t necessarily read verbatim, and have always pre-selected bits I can skip if the talk is going too long. My prepared text is like a script– I can improvise as I see fit.
Having attended several philosophy meetings, and heard historians speak at scientific meetings, I don’t think the difference between science and humanities talks is as great as the stiffness of “reading a paper aloud” might imply.
GCM
Hi Greg. When I gave professional talks, I wrote them out in a conversational style and then delivered them. I practiced over and over so that, while I had the text with me at the lectern, I mostly delivered the talks from memory. So, in that sense, I “read” my talks to the audience. I did what you do.
But I never gave a talk by literally reading the published paper verbatim. That’s what folks in the humanities often did (in the olden days of the 1980’s and 1990’s when I was in academia) and maybe still do. That’s the sense of “reading a paper” I meant in my comment above: literally reading the published journal article aloud. Mercifully, those papers rarely contained tables of statistics. 🙂
Comment by Greg Mayer
Hey Norm. Most of my philosophy conference experience is from the 2000-2010s, and from philosophy job talks in the same time period. They were using Powerpoint (a mixed blessing) and not reading a published paper or manuscript, so I think they were moving in a more science-y direction by then. Reading a published paper or manuscript aloud was, I was told, a formerly common occurrence. Philosophers often used handouts (which Edward Tufte also recommends). It is still common for philosophers to circulate a manuscript or recently published paper before the meeting, and a session will consist of others responding to the paper/MS.
I have seen scientists do thing like show a small-font table of data and statistics, and then say something like, “As you can see from the slide . . .”, and you can’t see a thing! 🙂
GCM
With (some) tongue-in-cheek, I suspect that slides are not used in humanities presentations for two reasons:
(1) Authors feel losing the chance to ‘surprise’ the audience with clever rhetoric.
(2) Many a thesis, when put into properly concise slide form would either evaporate into banality, or become more clearly understood and thus vulnerable to counter-arguments.
I make notes just to keep “on track”, but I have generally gone through the talk in my mind so many times that I don’t need them. I have never just stood there and read the text. It also depends on the audience. Academic conferences may require precise communication, but I have also made presentations to historical groups and other non-professional gatherings. In these cases, I like to chat with people as we are setting up and get a feeling for the general level of involvement and interest. If I deem it better for the presentation, I can alter the introduction or go into more detail in certain areas. Can’t do that if you read a text. I believe that maintaining this kind of flexibility makes a talk a lot more engaging and memorable. I also try to make the Q and A interesting. I answer the question, but I also like to use it as an opportunity to bring up related material of interest. I really like it when the Q and A turns into a general discussion. When this happens, I know I have done a good job.
When I was in Jr. High and High School back in the 1970s, we had to give “oral reports” in a variety of classes, from English to History to Biology. We were always required to speak without a script, although notes written on index cards were allowed. Even in Industrial Arts (shop), we had to give a report on sources of power, and the teacher said “I don’t want you reading the whole thing off a paper like a robot. If you know the subject, you don’t need to read it.” My report was on “Animals as Power Sources” (horses on treadmills, etc.), and I was one of the few students who followed the instructions to not read from a paper; the teacher congratulated me for it.
Are other schools different? I was wondering if the difference between how science and the humanities lectures are presented goes back to school.
My school in the 1960s had some of that, but I mainly recall a semester of English called “Speech” which involved both theory and much in-class practice. I painfully remember one occasion of delivering a class speech where I messed up so badly I struggled to hold back the tears ☹️; I vowed never to repeat that experience.
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” (Oscar Wilde)
“We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.”
Bob Ross
(I note that he worked with paints and brushes. Had he worked in a machine shop, he would have understood that most accidents are not “happy.”)
Fair enough, but he did specify happy accidents. 🙂
I once sat through someone reading a paper verbatim. Dire – it prompted the person sitting to one side to mutter darkly that this was why she’d never have survived in the humanities. I have no recollection of the contents or even subject of the talk.
A science talk will normally (at least for old farts like me) use slides derived from multiple related (and sometimes unrelated) studies to make a (hopefully) cohesive picture – it’s not reasonable to assume the audience has read, or remembers, all the past papers and people need to be reminded or brought up to speed to explain how we got to where we are and to see why we are now headed in a particular direction.
The other thing that is lost in a “reading” is the ability to address questions as they arise – which I always prefer to waiting until the end. Even if the answer is “on my next slide”. This also helps with the conversational/interactive nature of a presentation.
Amen brother.
The joke goes that an expert is someone who comes from more than fifty miles away. Maybe the speaker’s (reciter’s?) authority role moves his/her/their illusion as an expert closer to home.
It’s musical – the human voice – there’s something to it. That’d make sense to some extent in humanities.
I once heard a scientist go 100% from the podium. Nothing else. I was impressed – (not everyone though) way old school.
But – there’s a fast lane – gotta pick one.
When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, my MA (Anthropology) and PhD (Linguistics) supervisors insisted that we write out our conference presentations and then read them aloud – although they were meant to be written in a style that was more suitable to oral delivery. The reasoning was that you needed to remember everything you wanted to say, and how you wanted to say it, and that you should stick to your allotted time.
After I finished my PhD and Powerpoint started replacing overhead transparencies, I switched to talking around the slides, though I sometimes had notes in the slides to remind myself of important points. I now have a good idea of how many slides I need per minute of allotted time.
About 20 years ago I was on sabbatical at an institute for humanities research where we had to attend weekly seminars by the fellows. I was bemused by the practice of philosophers and literary scholars to read their written papers (some already published) aloud. Only I and one other fellow (an Irish scholar of English literature) used Ppt. When I asked for not only a Ppt projector but also a cassette player (to play linguistic examples), the administrator reacted as if I’d asked for an interstellar spacecraft.
Oh yeah, the only other time since finishing my PhD that I’ve written a presentation beforehand to be read aloud was when I gave presentations in Brazil in Portuguese, which is not my native language.
“ This is particularly true in the humanities when papers are written in academic language, which is often deadly dull.”
Perhaps an extemporaneous talk wouldn’t sufficiently capture the dullness.
On similar lines, I started watching two different sets of maths lectures from Oxford Univerisy which were posted online. In both cases, the lecturers were writing out on the board virtually every word they spoke. Quite unnecessary and tedious in my view.
If something is based upon convolution, an attempt to sound impressive, rather than to get to the truth, then there’s no easy way to speak extemporaneously on it. If you’ve deeply researched something, deeply understood something, and that something is based upon truth and logic, then riffing about it is so much easier.
I think you may be overgeneralizing the humanities here. I’m a philosopher of science, and it is certainly not typical in my field (or in the broader field of anaytic philosophy) to read papers. It happens, but it is rare. Speaking extemporaneously is much more common. Perhaps reading is more standard in other areas of the humanities.
I did once attend a conference on hermeneutics, because a close friend of mine was presenting a paper. In that conference, a large proportion of people were reading their papers. I think I came up with a possible explanation at the time: hermeneuticists spend a lot of time thinking about interpretation of texts, and sometimes about the changes in meaning that can be induced by even seemingly small changes in language. Perhaps as a consequence they are much more sensitive to ensuring that they convey the exact meaning they intend, and extemporizing might threaten that. I freely admit that this is a bit of a just-so story. I did not at the time consider that this may be a wider convention in the humanities than I thought.
Isn’t this another aspect of the fact that in Humanities students study a topic by thoroughly scrutinizing original texts (and this can also be a topic of a research project) instead of just learning from recent textbooks or lecture notes?
I’ve been out of the loop for a few days, so I’m late to this party – but – this all reminded me of the late Howard Shapiro, a flow cytometry guru who often wrote very clever songs about scientific topics. His best effort was that he accompanied himself on guitar as he sang an entire 20 minute plenary session, and most of the lyrics rhymed!