GSA #6: Conference (and) Abstracts

To this day, I've never had an abstract accepted to the MLA conference. It's a funny feeling—a part of me is like, "Who cares? It's just a giant meat market with little regard to Asian Lit anyway...why should I go?" But another part of me is like, "Dammit, why won't you let me in?!?!" It's like Virginia Woolf (er, Nicole Kidman) says in The Hours: Even crazy people like to be asked.

But the last few months have been abstract season, which means I've been churning out a lot of abstracts—and reading a fair amount, too. I usually follow the advice from The Professor Is In on how to write conference paper abstracts, and it makes me feel better about what I submit. I understand that there is both some amount of formula to these things, as well as the need to be original and true to your own style/scholarship. But there are certain necessary ingredients for a good abstract, and the advice is a good place from which to start.

Especially in organizing conference panels (third time's the charm?), I always get a little confused when I read abstracts without an argument. You tell me what you're going to study, you tell me why it's significant...but for crying out loud, are you going to have anything interesting to say about it??

We know that conference abstracts are a guess at best: that when it comes time to write the actual paper (two weeks before the conference), it'll look different from what you proposed six months before. And I think that's good—it's a sign that, even in those six months, you've learned and thought about more things to make you write a better paper. But without that initial guess, how will you know which direction you're headed?