(no subject)

[fadeaccompli]

This paper on Thucydides isn't going to write itself. Which is fine! I have an outline and an opening paragraph and an opening quotation and a stack of relevant books and some nice quotes from a relevant article, and it's not actually due until Monday, because all I need to do tomorrow is give a presentation to the class on it.

On a totally unrelated note, someone give me a good estimate for how many words take about 15 minutes to read at a slow, thoughtful pace.

Comments

[dorothean]

One of my professors said that for presentations, one (double-spaced) page = two minutes.

From very recent experience I have found that this means a page that is shorter than what one produces in MS Word with the default font settings (Calibri size 11). I can and did read a five-page, double-spaced report in that font in exactly ten minutes, but it was by no means slow or thoughtful.

Elsewhere I have seen that one page = 250 words. This is much shorter than my usual page, so perhaps that's the kind of page that can be read thoughtfully in two minutes. In this case 15 minutes = 3750 words.

[fadeaccompli]

Good heavens, my whole paper isn't even that long. Hm. Well, there's an introductory bit that needs to get cut anyway because of the audience, and I'll be skipping the footnotes... I may just read the rest, with an eye on the time, and summarize on the later paragraphs if I'm running short.

[dorothean]

.... I came back to inquire how it went, and then I realized that 3750 words is 15 pages of 250 words each. Gah! I meant to say that if 2 minutes = one page = 250 words, then 15 minutes = 7.5 pages = 1875 words. That sounds better!

I hope that didn't lead you astray! I shouldn't try to be helpful with arithmetic in the middle of writing my own term papers.

[fadeaccompli]

I ended up speaking pretty freely with an eye towards my paper for organization and relevant quotes, rather than trying to read anything out explicitly. And it went really well. There was one point where I lost my train of thought and sort of stammered mid-sentence for what felt like an eternity (and was maybe five seconds, tops), but then I figured it out again and kept going. The questions were great--if mostly ones I couldn't answer well, being about things I hadn't studied--and the prof seemed to like it, with only one suggestion on something I could expand on slightly.