Conferencing 201: From Abstract to Presentation
Congratulations on having your abstract accepted for a conference!
Now what?
How do you expand your abstract into something suitable for oral presentation? How do you cut an existing dissertation chapter down and maintain a coherent argument? Do you need to prepare handouts or slide decks?
This resource page builds from a joint WCC and Feminism in Classics event geared towards demystifying the process of presenting your research at a conference.
Before browsing, we encourage you to review the materials available on the ever-expanding WCC Conferencing 101 resource page and the Abstracts resource page.
Presenters:
Andromache Karanika, University of California at Irvine
Fae Amiro, Mount Allison University, Canada (winner of Women’s Network Contingent Scholar Paper Presentation Prize 2025 and Classical Association of Canada Graduate Student Paper Presentation Prize 2019)
Allie Pohler, University of Kansas (winner of Women’s Classical Caucus Pre-PhD Paper Presentation 2024-2025)
Click above for a recording of the event, which includes an introduction by Melissa Funke and Suzanne Lye, as well as responses from panelists Andromache Karanika, Fae Amiro, and Allie Pohler.
Facilitators:
Melissa Funke, University of Winnipeg, Canada
Suzanne Lye, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“What we have loved, others will love, and we will show them how.”
Introduction
Melissa Funke and Suzanne Lye
Why this conference right now, for you?
Before writing your paper, ask yourself these key questions:
How are you using this conference?
You may wish to build your academic network or are on the job market, so you are promoting your work. You may just be sharing new research and might want some feedback to help shape and refine your ideas.
What do you want to get out of it, professionally and personally?
This depends on where you are in your career and what your next steps are in reaching your goals. Think carefully about how this conference will benefit you and your research trajectory.
What are you hoping to take home with you?
You may wish to receive feedback on speculative work or use this paper to promote yourself and your research.
The Purpose of Conferences
To present yourself as a scholar to the field and to your peers
To claim a scholarly space, especially for early-career scholars
To network with different communities
Fundamentals for Approaching Presentations
View the following fundamentals as your guiding principles before and as you begin writing your presentation paper.
Audience
Different conferences will attract different audiences. Your abstract may have been accepted into a large annual meeting (e.g., SCS), which will attract a more general audience with diverse research areas. Alternatively, your paper might be one of few within a specialized conference on a narrow topic, in which case your audience may comprise experts on that topic.
Accessibility
Bake accessibility considerations into your process rather than convert a presentation deck or handout after the fact. Treat accessibility as a baseline of your process, rather than as an extra feature. See the SCS Accessibility Guidelines for guidance.
Approachability
Consider how to make your complex idea communicable to a specialized and/or general audience. What specific knowledge is required for your audience to follow your arguments? Structure your paper in ways that leave room for plenty of signposts and entry points.
Mechanics of Converting Abstract to Presentation
Double-check your allotted time for presentations. Sometimes, estimating your presentation length based on the number of written pages can be unreliable. Rehearse your paper to be safe, aiming to speak at a reasonable pace with a few off-the-cuff comments.
Determine how you want to format your presentation materials (i.e., slide deck, handout, etc.). Depending on your topic, your evidence, and what type of analysis they demand, you might choose one type of presentation material over another or a combination thereof.
Remember that an oral paper should communicate differently than a written article. Consider: What are the key takeaways you want your audience to learn from your argument? Some impactful techniques include signposting, simplifying ideas, and adding more repetition than you would in a written paper.
Do not deviate too much from your abstract. Your abstract is a kind of promise to your audience. While some findings may shift based on further research, you should still aim to stay relatively faithful to the spirit of your abstract. No surprises!
Review the SCS Accessibility Guidelines document. Do this before writing.
The writing process: Committing Words to Paper
Prioritize your best evidence.
For a 20-minute conference paper, including every piece of evidence you have for a particular argument may not be as impactful as you might hope. Instead, choose your most compelling example and do a close analysis of it. Quality over quantity!
Tips on considering content and flow as you write:
The process of building a conference paper from an abstract will be different from when producing a paper from an existing written piece. For the latter, your job is to edit down, refine, and distill your research so that it works as an oral presentation. A reader can sit with long sentences and complex ideas, but a listener cannot.
Remember that while you’ve had time to explore your ideas and arguments, your audience may be hearing them for the first time. Be judicious with the information you include and break down complex ideas into smaller, digestible chunks. Read out loud to yourself as you go. This will untangle thoughts that are easier to understand on the page, as well as break up long sentences. (Don’t be a Cicero! Don’t make your audience look for the main verb!)
Use verbal signposting throughout your presentation to remind your audience where you are and how you are building your argument. What may feel a little too on the nose on paper may sound natural and impactful for an oral presentation. Signposting engages your audience and gives them the roadmap that you have visualized for yourself.
Include reminders to yourself in the text from which you plan to read (e.g., “pause here”, “look up”, “next slide”). Highlight or expand the font of these cues as needed.
Make the text accessible for you. You may wish to use a larger sized font than what you’re used to, as well as experiment with line spacing so that your paper is visually more manageable to read out loud.
The Finishing Touches
Leading up to the Conference
Make sure your presentation materials have been carefully proofread, especially in the case of a handout–that is, anything that someone will walk out of holding in their hands.
Review the SCS Accessibility Guidelines document.
A conference rookie non-negotiable: Show your presentation and materials to a trusted professor or mentor (i.e., someone who has more experience and may spot issues that newer conference-goers may not)
Sign up for an on-demand mentor through the WCC On-Demand Mentorship Program
Find out about the technology for the room in which you will be presenting and make sure you have several ways of accessing your paper and materials at the conference (e.g., printed, on the cloud, USB, emailed to self, etc.)
Be in touch with your panel presider a few days ahead of time, if possible. You may wish to arrive a little early before your panel to meet them. If you have time, perhaps you may wish to see the capacity of the room so you may gauge the number of handouts needed.
Game-Day Considerations
Practice, practice, practice! Present your paper to a critical and supportive audience so that you can practice not only your delivery, but also your timing and how you interact with your supplementary materials.
Aim to be professional but also authentic: authenticity is what makes a speaker engaging to an audience.
Remember that the audience wants you to succeed!
Enjoy yourself! If you are excited about your work and enjoy the process of delivering it, chances are your audience will enjoy learning about it!
Approaches and Words of Advice
On being the interlocutor
Andromache Karanika
At the end of the day, a conference presentation is an act of communication, and your job is to make different angles of your analysis be in conversation with one another.
One way to reframe your approach to paper writing is to imagine that the source is speaking to you and that you become the interlocutor between your source and your audience. You are merely a director of the sequence of the arguments. Owning that space can help with the flow of your writing, and shape your mind and disposition towards enjoying the act of communicating your ideas rather than feeling anxious about it.
With the understanding that everyone works differently and has a unique academic flow, you may want to choose one quote/passage/artifact/primary element to be your North Star. This is especially helpful when you are bursting with ideas and angles for interpretation, and might not know where to start or how to synthesize them into one simple argument.
On knowing your audience
Fae Amiro
More often than not, we find ourselves with a final product that might be a couple pages over or a few minutes too long. How do you know what to cut out? Sometimes, knowing or anticipating your audience based on your panel topic or conference theme can help determine what sections you can remove altogether, as well as frame your arguments in a way that’s accessible to them.
For example, material culture scholars may find themselves in conferences centered on history, art history, and/or archaeology. You could present the same paper to each set of audience members, but the background you provide might be different. What may work for an audience of archaeologists may not for an audience of historians, and vice versa.
Look at the other panelists who are presenting before you. If your paper covers a similar discipline, specialization, or research topic to them, then you can assume that the audience will have already learned about it by the time they get to you. The generic contextual background in your paper can therefore be cut out, shortened, or merely alluded to in your slides/handout, leaving more room for your unique arguments. When you’re well-rehearsed, this is something that you may be more comfortable doing. Give yourself the time to say the important stuff–material that only you can say!
Pro tip by Andromache Karanika: Present like a presider! Gesture to other papers in your panel; this is a sign of scholarly collegiality and community.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to cut an entire section from your paper that was mentioned in your abstract, so long as the core of your topic and main argument survives. Let’s reframe: removing an entire section may feel like a loss, but perhaps it was always meant to be its own paper. Consider expanding that section and submitting it as a distinct abstract for another conference. Alternatively, if you’re presenting with a slide deck, include bonus slides in anticipation for potential questions on the cut material during the Q&A. You may even want to signpost to those bonus slides during your presentation and see who picks up on it.
Finally, keep your audience in mind in how you present your ideas: think of it as writing a script rather than a paper. Change words or phrases to match how you actually speak, even if it doesn’t look as nice on paper. When citing authors, list the most impactful ones that your research is indebted to; allow your audience to absorb one or two important citations rather than overwhelming them with a comprehensive list. Consider including cues to yourself, like “take a breath” or “big pause”. For multilingual conferences, you may consider slowing down your speaking speed or including a link to the text of your presentation for accessibility.
“Practice for your specific situation and your specific audience.”
Panelists’ tips on timing your paper:
No one has ever complained about a 19-minute (or less) paper! Always plan to finish presenting a minute or two before the designated timeframe–this will give you one less thing to worry about and allow you to enjoy the act of communication rather than having to rush through it.
Timing yourself beforehand is so important. The more prepared you are and the more you’re able to take your time during your presentation, the more you’re able to be extemporaneous and helpful to your audience (e.g., picking up on cues and adjusting in real time).
Skipping through slides or pages to make up for time during your presentation can be disorienting to your audience. It’s better to arrive polished and ready to enjoy the experience!
On building confidence
Allie Pohler
It’s not guaranteed that you know the most about a given topic in a given room, but you know the most about your arguments within that topic. While you should definitely honor the scholars that your research is indebted to, also make sure you’re highlighting your own contributions. For high impact, present your strongest evidence versus all your evidence, and share your expertise on that evidence with other experts. This is something to feel confident and proud of: you have meaningful things to say that other experts want to hear about. If you didn’t, your abstract would not have been accepted.
“You’re there presenting because a program committee read through countless abstracts and said, “We want to hear about this argument.” You already have that stamp of approval, so internalize it and let yourself present with that confidence.”
Allie’s tips on building confidence and avoiding unnecessary headaches during the presentation:
Make sure that it is impossible for anyone in your audience to walk away not knowing what your main argument was. Re-state your thesis, re-state your conclusion.
If you’ve decided to use both handouts and slides, work on only one of them at a time. That way, if you need to adjust, you only have to edit one document. Once you have a final copy, then transfer the material to the other form.
When presenting with a printed script, opt for endnotes vs footnotes, as the latter will skew the length of your presentation, and you won’t know exactly how long it takes to read through it.
Single-sided printing, no staples: it’s all about the ease of movement.
Be kind to yourself; don’t use phrases or words that you know you’ll trip over
Q&A and final tips
1. What’s the best way to prepare for a hybrid and/or virtual conference? What details should presenters consider for impact and accessibility?
Record yourself presenting ahead of time!
Get a sense on how you’re moving in front of the computer screen and determine what’s impactful or distracting. Yes, it may feel cringey to watch yourself present, but it’s very helpful to ensure that your virtual presence is exactly how you intend it to be.
Pay attention to your background.
Note what’s visible or not, if you’re front-lit or back-lit, where your microphone is and where to position it so that your voice can be heard over background noise (i.e., rustling papers, squeaky chairs, etc.). The background blur feature may be useful if you’re not able to present in a quiet, professional space. Alternatively, you can use a background photo of your office.
Try to speak to the audience instead of looking down at your paper.
This might feel awkward, but try to look at the light of the camera or the top of the screen. (Some people even put a sticky note with eyes beside the camera!). Alternatively, you might want to forgo a printed paper and keep a pdf open on the screen and positioned at your sightline, but make sure your audience is only seeing your slideshow and not the text itself. The point is to be mindful about where your eye line is. This is why rehearsing ahead of time is so important.
2. For in-person presentations, can I read off of a tablet or phone instead of printing out a physical copy of my paper?
The general agreement is that bigger-screen tablets are starting to be used more often, but the phone gives off the impression that you’re unprepared. Because of the size of the screen, your face may be constantly looking down and you will be distracted by the constant scrolling and potential notifications popping up.
With that said, if you’d like to use the timer app for reassurance that you’re right on track throughout your presentation, feel free to do so!
Pro tip by Melissa Funke: Once the conference program comes out, take note of where you are in your panel and what part of the day your panel is held. Prepare accordingly: ensure you’re hydrated and fed; if you’re the first presenter, be extra respectful of the time so that everyone gets a chance to present; if you’re the last presenter, portion out your energy appropriately throughout the panel.
3. How can I best prepare for the question-and-answer period after my presentation?
Do practice talks with mentors and advisors! Your practice audience will be very good at making educated guesses about the types of questions you might get for your paper. Sign up for the WCC On-Demand Mentorship Program if you’d like to rehearse your paper with a mentor.
The types of questions you receive may also depend on the theme or topic of your panel. For example, a numismatics paper in a panel about coins will likely draw a more knowledgeable audience in that subfield, so the questions you receive may be more informed than, say, an audience attending an art history panel.
If you end up getting a question that you couldn’t anticipate ahead of time or don’t know the answer to, don’t panic. Be curious and excited, don’t be shy about saying that you’ll need some time to think about the question more, and thank the person asking for introducing you to a new angle or interpretation.
Make sure your name and contact information is easy to find on your handouts or slides, so that attendees can follow-up with you if they think of questions later. You might also want to update your professional online profile, because you might get an uptick in views leading up to your paper.
4. What are your thoughts about using props or physical objects as presentation aids?
The panelists have mostly seen props and 3D printed replicas of artifacts in pedagogy workshops or poster presentations rather than conference papers. If you choose to use a physical object, weigh the pros and cons about its intended impact (versus, say, a large image of it on a slide or handout).
When you share or circulate your object, note that a certain portion of your audience might stop listening to your presentation, because they’re focused on and enjoying your object.
You might also be distracted when juggling between an object and your paper, especially if you’re including a demonstration with it. If this is your plan, make sure to practice with it.
You should never bring any real antiquities to a conference. Most classics organizations have either an explicit or implicit policy against 1) the discussion of artifacts that lack proper provenance and have not previously been published and/or 2) the promotion of antiquities personally owned by the speaker.
5. I notice that some speakers will turn their abstracts into the paper’s introduction or will at least repeat sentences/phrases between one and the other. How much of your abstract can you copy into your presentation?
This is generally accepted, although you may want to approach the abstract as a roadmap. Abstract writing is a different genre than paper writing, so if you’re feeling limited by the language of your abstract, it might be better to put it away and write your paper separately.
Then again, there’s usually a long gap between submitting an abstract and writing the conference paper, so it’s easy to forget what exactly you were working on. Sometimes, our panelists have revisited the abstract and were pleasantly surprised with themselves for having already created the scaffolding for the paper. As the saying goes, “the beginning is half of everything,” and the abstract is a great starting point, so long as you give yourself space to make adjustments after conducting more research.
Assuming that not everyone in the audience has read your abstract, you might even want to include it in your handout, then change the language of your introduction to avoid repetition.