ENGL 8115 Project

Overview
This assignment requires you to write a proposal for a 15-20-minute individual presentation for a conference on or related to technical communication (or your particular field of specialty). Find a conference CFP (call for proposals). Read its guidelines carefully before you start writing your proposal.

Audience
There are a few different audiences you should consider for this assignment. The first, primary audience will be reviewers of proposals for the particular conference. They are the people who will decide the fate of your proposal. Most conferences will send the proposals received to different panels of specialists, most of whom are professors in the field. A secondary audience will be those people who will possibly attend the conference. Although you do not have to address them in your proposal, you do have to address the question how your presentation relates to and would benefit this audience. This audience typically includes both professors and graduate students for academic conferences and both researchers and practitioners for more practice-oriented conferences such as the STC (Society for Technical Communication) conference.

Design
There is no set design for conference proposals. Which design is effective depends on the specific conference and its guidelines for proposals. That’s why it’s important that you specify which conference you are writing the proposal for and get an actual copy of the conference’s call for proposals. In spite of this, there are certain expectations about proposals that are rather generic to most, if not all, conference proposals.

Problem/Need/Research Gap: Typically, a conference proposal begins by identifying a problem, a need, or a gap in current research. Describe briefly what this problem/need/research gap is. Some contextualization is necessary, but avoid lengthy elaborations.

Your Contribution: After identifying the need, discuss what you are going to present at the conference and how this proposed talk will contribute to a solution to or a better understanding of the issue at hand. Outline the content of your talk. Make sure that your description shows a promise of original ideas. Avoid being too general or too detailed.

Significance: Following your description of the content of your presentation, you should now discuss how your talk will benefit the specific area of research and the field in general. Be sure to specify which audiences will potentially benefit from your presentation. Be careful not to be too selective of your potential audience. Generally speaking, conference organizers are more receptive to those proposals that benefit a larger audience than to those that relate to a very limited audience.

A Proposal Reviewer’s Perspective
A key to successful conference proposals is to demonstrate that this is a well thought out (and often already executed) project rather than just some preliminary ideas. Based on my experience of reviewing numerous proposals for multiple conferences, one common problem with many proposals is that they devote too much space to stating the issue and contextualizing it and leave too little space to describing what the presenter will do in the presentation. To reviewers, this is often an indication that the presenter knows what topic/issue he/she wants to address but hasn’t figured out what exactly to talk about yet. So, be specific and detailed about the content of your presentation. 

Format & Miscellaneous
CFPs will usually specify the kind of format they expect to see. If they’re not available, usually you should have the following components: a title (make it an eye-catching one), presenter’s name, organizational affiliation, type of presentation (individual, panel, workshop, roundtable, etc.), and topic area (for some larger conferences). Sometimes, they would ask you to provide the contact information on a separate sheet.

Save your file as “Conference(LastNameFirstName),” e.g., “Conference(SmithJohn).”