A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

Plan your conference proposal
Presenting research in alternative forums
Research and writing

Conferences are good opportunities to share your work, but to be invited to speak, you usually have to submit a proposal. Write it not as a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of your work but as a thirty-second “elevator story”—what you would tell someone who asked, as you both stepped into an elevator on the way to your talk, What are you saying today? In fact, a carefully prepared and rehearsed elevator story is very useful for any conversation about your work, particularly interviews.

An elevator story has three parts:

✵ ▪ a problem statement that highlights an answer to So what?

✵ ▪ a sketch of your claim and major reasons

✵ ▪ a summary of your most important evidence

Conference reviewers are less interested in your exact words than in why anyone should want to listen to them. Your aims are to pose your research question and to answer the reviewer’s So what? So focus on how your claim contributes to your field of research, especially on what’s novel or controversial about it. If you address a question established by previous research, mention it, then focus on your new data or your new claim, depending on which is more original. Be aware that reviewers will often know less about your topic than you do and may need help to see the significance of your question.

Besides gaining acceptance to the conference, a conference proposal has one other objective. Its title and often its abstract (or even the full proposal) are used to attract an audience to the session in which the proposed talk will be scheduled. A good conference proposal thus has a clear and substantive title (see 10.3), one that lets an audience know what to expect.