lecture in progress

It took about 26 minutes to write the Introduction to the Manchester lecture. It’s not final final yet, but for some reason I tend write more slowly and carefully on the first draft when it’s a lecture, rather than my frantic rough draft method for books and articles. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s a fairly consistent pattern for me.

For this reason, the current draft is already pretty clean, and I don’t think it will take more than 5 or 6 minutes to clean up this Introduction later, and at that rate it would take just under 5 hours to complete the whole lecture.

They told me to speak for half an hour, as I’ve mentioned. The numbers I’ve always carried around in my head, based on long Friday night lectures I heard as an undergraduate (a St. John’s College tradition) was that 30 pages might run for an hour.

But I need to get that figure out of my head, because the fact is, I’m a fast talker. For me, it’s more like 42 pages of double-spaced Times New Roman per hour. What I’ll probably do in this case is shoot for 18 pages and try to slow down the reading a little bit. But it will surely be finished by the time my friends are back in town on Monday morning.

Why write a text for this event at all? Some people moralize about this, and claim that you should be able to speak off the top of your head about your life’s work at any time. Sure, you should. And there are occasions where that’s obviously the right thing to do.

But what’s the main problem with prepared-text lectures? The fact that they are sometimes boring, and sometimes the speaker is paying more attention to the pieces of paper than to the audience. But if you can avoid being boring (and no one seems to think my prepared lectures are boring) then prepared texts have some obvious points of superiority. You can craft the wording more perfectly to convey exactly the meaning you want. And you will also end up with a written document that you can rework into printed form to be read by others.

After a couple of years of experimenting with only speaking from notecards, I’ve reverted to using mostly prepared texts, specially written for the event in question. The exception is when the person inviting me makes a point of saying “this will be really informal”. In that case it seems like overkill to write out the lecture, and improvisation anchored in notecards is more than enough. (I’d hate to do it without notecards at least, since there would be the danger of rambling a bit.) Actually, there’s another exception, which is whenever I’m dealing with a definitely non-specialist, non-academic audience. In such cases a prepared text is not just useless, but actually an obstacle.

It feels good to have the first few pages under my belt because, as always, the ex nihilo stage is the most daunting. Once you have even a couple of pages, some momentum has built up.