Cars gathered at the drive-in movie theater. Photo Credit: Isabel Wong.
Before this semester, I always thought of presentations as research’s final hurrah. Paper written, edits made, the presentation is simply the bow, the final flourish completing the package. As I’ve learned from this semester, that isn’t always, or even often, the case.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself needing to give a presentation on a paper I hadn’t yet finished. Perhaps this is a typical predicament, but it was new to me. While I figured I’d limit my presentation to the portion of the paper I had done the most research and work on, I couldn’t simply read aloud those couple of pages. Despite being the most thoroughly researched part of my paper, the pages hadn’t exactly reached clarity nor coherency. Quotes from scholars, while there, were simply plunked in between paragraphs of my own writing, unattached and unanalyzed. I hadn’t gone back and edited the section, which sprawled across the page, repetitious and unnecessarily detailed.
