Old fashioned ways...

Attending the SBL Annual Meeting is also - believe it or not - to attend some lectures. But, being one of those who do not have English as my mother tongue, my understanding and profit of some of the lectures are sometimes not as good as I would like. There are many reasons for this; in addition to my own understanding of the language, some presenters are speaking much too fast, and what is my main point here; I do think it is somewhat old fashioned to have a 40 minute session of listening to a scholar speed-reading his paper. As we do live in the 21. century there should be more ways of making one's ideas available.

• Some lecturers do hand out a sheet of paper with texts they refer to, but just quite a few (of those I attended) did hand out an outline of the lecture. I would even ask for a handout with the main arguments of the paper. Using a program like FinePrint makes it passible to decrease the size and thus print several pages on a A4 piece of paper. That would help the audience to follow the arguments, and thus also to improve the debate.
• I would also prefer that more presenters were using programs like PowerPoint or similar visualizing devices to enhance the appropriation of the paper.
• Webpages are also nice places to publish the papers in advance. Especially now as the SBL Seminar Paper book is no more to be published, this would be a way to do it. And there sure might be other ways.

Mark Goodacre has also some - as so often - very pertinent comments concerning the old fashioned way of presenting papers:

One of the striking differences about the CARG in comparison to many of the other sections is that speakers rarely actually read out papers. Because they are illustration-rich, they tend to "speak to" their topic. Now I've been wondering recently why it is that so many academics read out their papers so often -- it's the standard. I am toying with the idea of not reading out my own paper to the Mark Group tomorrow. My reason for wondering about this is that there is something absurd about writing out a paper and then reading out one's own voice, sometimes stumbling over the very words that one has written. Why not just talk about it? We all do this when we lecture all the time -- very few scholars these days read out lectures to undergraduates, do they?
I've asked a few people about this business of reading out papers and why it is the norm. One colleage said to me that it is for him a question of timing. Another said that it was fear. It was all about the importance of making sure that one does not say anything erroneous or silly. I think that that may be the best reason I have heard yet, but I wonder whether it's sufficient. I would say that audiences are sympathetic to people who give a paper extempore and understand that one is not going strictly on the record with every tiny nuance of one's speech.I do think this may be a way to do it, at least it some cases. But in papers of a very technical nature, with lot of references to texts, words, terms, etc etc it might be a problem. But by combining some of the more recent technical devises we have, I see very few reasons to continue speed-reading a 40 minute paper of complicated arguments. Don't you agree?