Writing conference paper...help!

[new2discus]

I have to write up an experiement i did as a conference paper, to be published etc (and then i have to stand up in front of a few hundred people and present it as well). Anyway dont know where to start, was thinking of writing it up as we were taught to at high school,

Aim/objective

Method

Limitations

Outcome

but thought someone might have some better ideas??

any thoughts much appreciated, this is stressing me out big time and i dont want to dissapoint anyone

[alanmin4304]

Looks good to me.

[Ktttk]

You might want to have 'Outcomes' before 'Limitations'.

That way you can present your results first and then talk about any limitations or factors you need to keep in mind when interpreting the results.

What conference is this for if you don't mind me asking?

[new2discus]

Thanks Ktttk, will do that. its for the IPPS (international plant propagators society) conference in about 3 weeks, paper is on clonal propagation of Clivia miniata

[Zev]

Do you have to do a PowerPoint as well?

If you do, and require handouts, it is probably better not to use the slide printouts for this purpose, we did this once for a conference and it looked pretty cheap and nasty compared to what others had prepared for handouts.

Also some conferences like to publish these with an ISBN number and distribute it to libraries, so a well composed printout looks much better - it can just be a transcript of your speech with pictures or diagrams.

[new2discus]

Dont actually have to do a powerpoint presentation but havn't decided what i'm doing, will be pretty boring if i just get up an talk, but have no experience with powerpoint so will probably leave it alone. there has been no suggestion of handouts, just that the official paper will be published! Scary stuff!

thanks for all the help, i dont know how people get up an talk in front of others all the time...

[Zev]

Do you have pics or diagrams you would like to show, PowerPoint can be quite handy.

Probably best to ask if they are going to have a computer and data projector setup at the conference first - if not, don't bother about it.

If you want a PowerPoint done, give me a PM, I will see what I can do for you.

[Rob]

I guess first off - some of my suggestions are based on international conferences I've attended and/or presented at (as part of my work as a uni lecturer) - so there may be aspects that are over-the-top or not required.

It seems that different science fields always have slight variations in what is required for conference papers/journal articles. To overcome this most conferences and journals provide authors with with 'author instuctions' about required layout, number of pages etc etc.

If you haven't been provided with anything like that then my suggestion would be to get a hold of a journal article published in your field (or a copy of the proceedings of a previous IPPS conference) to get an idea of what sort of stuff is included, how it is presented etc.

Pretty standard sections to have in most sciency conference papers are:

Abstract Almost a summary thing, should have a little bit of intro, a little bit of info about experimental techniques and definitely some mention of results obtained.

Introduction Provides background info to the topic and a lead in to specifically what you're investigating and why.

Experimental (some times called Materials and Methods) Give information about what you actually did in the experiment (the idea being that the information you provide is sufficient that someone else could replicate your experiment and therefore validate/confirm your results).

Results and Discussion Present your results and analyse/interpret them.

Conclusions Usually a recap of what has been achieved (i.e. key results).

References

So that's for the written portion. For the presentation portion - it's pretty common to be using powerpoint (but don't dive right in creating the powerpoint presentation - you should have written the paper first, then it's just take selected info from the paper to use in the presentation) - but should check with conference organisers to see what facilities are available.

If you do end up preparing a powerpoint presentation:

- you don't have to include all the information that you included in the written paper (since most conferences produce a printed proceedings where your full paper will have been included - so your audience would have that to refer back to if they needed more detail)

- adhere to the KISS principle:

-> use the same slide background for the whole presentation (and the background shouldn't be too 'busy')

-> keep animated transitions etc to a minimum (from past experience they're the most likely thing to stuff up)

-> don't put too many words on any single slide (good presenters usually use the words on the slide as a frame work that they then verbally annotate)

-> make sure images/graphs etc are large enough that the audience can actually tell what is going on

-> if you are using the most up-to-date version of powerpoint - save your presentation as an older version (just incase the software at the conference isn't as up to date as yours)

For actually giving the presentation:

- practice, get your timing right. If you are always going over time then you are trying to present too much information and should cull some of the slides from your presentation (you can still have this more detailed info in your full paper though).

- the most common error for first time presenters is going too fast - depending on how much you are 'verbally annotating' the slides you may only change slides once every 2 minutes.

Not very common (for the conferences I've been to) to be asked to provide handouts - only occured once where the paper hadn't been published in the proceedings - in that case the handout was a copy of the full paper - not a printout of the slides used for the presentation.

I don't know if all this information was overkill, hopefully at least some of it will be useful.

[new2discus]

Wow, thanks everyone, very useful info Rob, i appreciate the time you put into that. Just writing the paper for now, will prepare the presentation soon, might have to take you up on that offer Zev.

[Caryl]

Creating Powerpoints is pretty easy. Even I worked out how to do it! :lol:

Nothing as fancy as zev could do I am sure