From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose

I was in a conversation recently with someone facing one of the dread tasks of academic writing: turning a conference paper into an article. There are people who write conference papers that are basically already articles. Neither of us fit that bill.

My conference papers are intended to be talks. Informal. Funny. Carefully paced. They have places where I gesture at an image instead of describing it, places where a slide does half the argumentative work, and places where I say something in two sentences because I know I can explain it with tone of voice, pacing, or whatever I put up on the screen.

That works perfectly well in a conference room or on Zoom. It does not, however, make a good article. The rhythm’s wrong. The vocabulary is too casual. The argument often relies more on audience connection than carefully scripted references to an expansive scholarly literature.

And I think one reason conference-to-article conversion can feel so horrible is that we often describe the job as “expanding the conference paper.” For me, that framing is almost instantly stressful, because really, the skin doesn't fit.

A conference paper doesn't need to be expanded into an article. It needs to be translated into one. You need a mechanism for getting roughly the same intellectual content out, but in a different language.

So here's my practical step-by-step process. Guess what? It includes a spreadsheet.

Step 1. Break the conference paper apart

First, I copy the conference paper into a spreadsheet. Not paragraph by paragraph. Smaller than that. I put about one or two sentences into each row of the first column.

That sounds tedious. It really isn't. And the point is to stop seeing the conference paper as a sacred block of prose that somehow has to grow into something twice its size.

Now it is just a sequence of little ideas.

Next to each one, I have an empty box to its right. That empty box is where the article version goes.

Step 2. Translate, don't polish

Then I start rewriting down the second column. I am not line-editing the conference paper. I am asking what each little unit needs to become when the audience can no longer hear me speak.

Sometimes a conference-paper sentence survives almost unchanged. Sometimes two breezy sentences become a full paragraph. Sometimes I discover that a sentence was only functioning because the slide behind me contained six pieces of evidence. Sometimes I realize that “as we all know” is doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor.

This is where the translation idea helps me.

The question isn't: How do I make this sentence more article-like?

It's: What work was this sentence doing in the talk, and what does the article need in order to do the same work?

Those are different questions.

It looks like this:

(This is a real example from this spring: my conference-paper prose on the left, and article prose on the right. The point isn’t simply to make the original longer; it’s to ask what the written version needs in order to do the same argumentative work.)

Step 3. Insert the missing stuff

As I work, I simply insert blank spreadsheet rows wherever the article needs something the conference paper didn't: supporting examples, additional evidence, references to the scholarship, historical context, the important take-away to round out the argument.

For me, those blank rows are important psychologically. They turn “THIS PAPER NEEDS SO MUCH MORE STUFF” into a series of small, local jobs.

I don't have to solve the article. I have to fill this box. Then the next one. Then the one after that. Short tasks, not long ones.

Step 4. Don't forget the slides

If the conference slides contain substantial content, they go into the spreadsheet too.

This is particularly important for the way I give papers, because a lot of information can be sitting on the screen while I am saying very little about it. A chart that was visible for thirty seconds might become a full paragraph of article prose. An image may need description, contextualization, citation, and then actual analysis. A quotation I could simply let an audience read may need to be introduced and unpacked.

Slides are part of the conference paper's argument. If I convert only the script, I am leaving chunks of the original argument behind.

Step 5. Move back into a document

Eventually the second column begins to look less like a set of rewrites and more like an article draft. That's when I leave my beloved spreadsheet and move back into a regular document.

It may not be pretty, but by this point, it’s a continuity draft. I know what I’m saying, I know where in the article I’ll be saying it, and I’ve started using the voice that belongs to article prose instead of public delivery. It’s a win!

Step 6. Add the things articles need

Once I have a continuity draft in place, it’s easy – and fun! – to build out the parts that belong particularly to article format.

For me, that usually means a more substantial contextualizing introduction – the “lit review.” This is an excuse to decide what I want to include as context, and what not. The theorizing section is also an excuse to dive back into how I got interested in this problem in the first place. I limit myself to a maximum of three scholarly days, because playing around with the literature is the “big idea” part of the gig, and I could sit there for weeks, if given a chance.

It also means the conclusion gets bigger. Conference conclusions can sometimes amount to: “Look! This thing I have just shown you is neat, and here is why you should care.” Articles have more room for moralizing. I like the “so what, so what, now what” formulation. So what did we learn? And then: so what does that change (and for whom)? And finally: now what? What does this case let us see differently? What larger conversation does it alter? What becomes possible because we've followed the evidence this far?

Those questions are much easier for me to answer once I actually have article prose in front of me.

Step 7. Normal edits

After all of that work, the conference paper is essentially gone. I am editing an article.

That means the usual work: structure, argument, rhythm, clarity, flow, repetition, citations, transitions, and all the other things that make a draft slowly become something somebody else might want to read. (Taking out the giant shouty “LOOK FOR EX” and actually DO that work!). But that’s just cleanup!

Conference Paper → Article: The Seven Steps Break the conference paper apart Translate, don’t polish Insert the missing stuff Don’t forget the slides >Move back into a document Add the things articles need Normal edits

Why This Works for Me

I've used this exact process twice this past spring. Both conference papers became articles, and both articles were accepted, hooray! So I'm inclined to think the method has legs.

I don't imagine everyone needs the spreadsheet. Some people can probably make this transformation comfortably inside a Word document. That’s not me, though. Rewriting there feels like “failed text being edited,” over and over and over again.

The spreadsheet does something useful for my brain: it makes the act of translation visible. On the left is what worked when I was standing in front of a room. On the right is what has to work when I'm not there anymore. Low stress, lots of little steps, and a real sense of progress as the article comes together.

Bit by bit, as they say, and sooner or later it all gets done. With my spreadsheet method, it gets done faster, and with a lot less stress.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through my approach to choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Writing with Scissors and Tape: When a continuity draft had all the right material but none of the right choreography, I stopped trying to line-edit and just cut the thing apart. Paper strips, index cards, scissors, and tape became a way to see the argument again.

The Editing Horizon:Shaping the Argument First: Editing gets easier when you stop trying to fix everything at once. This post separates argument-level revision from sentence-level polish and makes the case for giving each kind of editorial work its own turn.

First Monday of a New Month: What to Write?

 

The first Monday of a new month is a day of possibilities, a day on which all kinds of streaks can start, a day on which… one wants to wind back the clock and have another couple days of weekend.

Monday practices vary by scholar, but one that I’ve found helpful is reviewing the writing-task spreadsheet. I keep a meta-list of all the project ideas I’ve got, and their possible (or actual) venues, and the status of the work involved. It’s not a “to-do” list, more like a “to-consider” list.

I treat this project-mapping like brainstorming. There are no bad writing projects; there are just projects that get assigned priority 1200.

That means I don’t automatically delete the oddities. Some sit at priority 1200 forever, and that’s fine. Others linger on the distant horizon for a year or four and unexpectedly acquire legs. Keeping those possibilities visible contributes to a kind of abundance mentality: the weird idea that pops out as an aside in a class lecture can remain available long enough to become an actual publication.

“Signposting Shakespeare” worked like that: from class observation to “huh, I think that has legs,” to collaborating with students on data collection and bibliography gathering, to writing to submission to publication. The first step in the process is to track the idea to begin with.

Which is why at the moment I have 107 items floating in the “I could consider this” array. Nine of those are in one of the “pending” categories (either waiting on proofs or waiting on publication), three are active, and one is in the “start gathering bibliography” stage.

Unlike my 30-day reading spreadsheets, I don’t actually put down everything I’m writing on my project-tracking spreadsheet. The point of THIS kind of tracking isn’t really to be able to show everything I’ve done – the gigantic CV is where that kind of thing goes. This is tracking-for-planning. Today’s post, for instance, is just the “hey, I need to warm up and get motivated” kind of writing that drops in and makes thinking through another task kind of fun. It never got entered.

But I did look over what last-month-me thought I should be doing. The spreadsheet helps me turn the vague sense that I have seventeen things I ought to be doing into something more concrete, and so more useful: this needs reading, this needs an email, this one is going to take a significant dive into my archival notes, that one can wait.

Plus the spreadsheet is a real blessing in terms of balancing what needs a fresh morning brain and which projects can be assigned to the afternoon me (who is less clever but often more dogged – a good bibliography ferret, but not so much a creative thinker). Putting words on page: morning task. Sending a follow-up email to the editor: afternoon work.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Since this spreadsheet is for tracking purposes, I have fourteen headers that have been useful for my purposes:

Timeframe	Priority	PROJECT
Venue / scope	Data collection	Bibl
Data analysis	Writing	Submission
Awaiting	Nudge date	Revision
Publish	Thank-Yous

Obviously, project and venue + scope are the most important for purposes of project definition – remembering what it is exactly that I thought this project might become. I find it helpful to enter timeframes for some projects, but mostly that’s just a “panic here” date – an upcoming request for proposals gets a visual signal of “pending deadline,” but a blog post is never going to get a date due. And one doesn’t bother with deadlines for that Revise and resubmit; by its very nature, it just joined this week’s (or next week’s) work stack. Priority is a sorting tool for me, not a strict order-of-operations column. To that end, I reuse a lot of numbers: 1 is this week, and there might be three to five projects that are active. 2 is “keep this in mind” – needing to prep my travel-reading meant that an article which I wasn’t “working on” was sitting in the visible spot for the last three months as my brain-dead filler task; I compiled the full bibliography during late afternoons *before* it became an active project. 9 is a “this has been submitted and needs tracking until its fate is known” category. 1200 is a “probably don’t ever do this” and 1300 is blog posts. The idea of priority numbering is to bunch things into buckets of how much the project needs my attention.

Then there’s the active work: data collection and bibliography-building are two often parallel tasks; they might become yellow and then green simultaneously, or I might do one or the other in completely different months. Likewise, analysis and writing might be intertwined or separate; I just need to be tracking where I am.

Submission is enough of an act of self-flagellation that it gets its own dopamine reward. After all, the things you’re fighting with are fierce. Two-factor authentication across firewall barriers. Footnote formatting by all the weird templates that people use. Writing the abstract or defining the keywords. Deciding whether a cover letter is needed or going with the simple submission. All of this is so involved that I long ago decided that it deserved its visibility in my work-flow.

And then there’s the long afterwards. Awaiting and nudge date sit in the same zone of limbo: not accepted, not rejected, just hanging out in that “under consideration” land. I used to just use “Awaiting” and then “Revision,” but some projects require more interaction and the nudge date lets me actively decide how long I want to wait before putting in a reminder and then (and this is critical) to not do anything about it until that date. I’m in the humanities: the goal is for weeks not to become months and months not to become years.

Revisions are where the R&R and copy-edits go, and Publish where proofs live respectively. (An outright rejection gets recorded on the “completed projects” tab – it’s the less happy kind of completion, but it does draw the project to a close. Then I get to decide, and the project either goes back to establish a different possible venue and consider rewriting or gets pushed off the list altogether. In either case, feedback is a gift.)

The last category is also important: when a project reaches its final stage, I like to contact people whose ideas helped me frame my own thoughts and thank them, and to write to archives that supported my research to show what came of it all. So Thank-Yous are part of tidying up at the end of project, a sort of tack-and-tie to my scholarly peers.

And then the spreadsheet is ready for another Monday. Most of those 107 ideas will not become this month’s work, and some of them may never become anything at all. That’s fine. The point isn’t to turn every possible project into a writing obligation. It’s to cultivate a kind of abundance mentality: to keep enough of the possibilities visible that, when Monday asks me what I should write next, I’m not staring at an empty page.

OTHER PRODUCTIVITY POSTS

The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — another approach to getting the sprawling mass of things-to-do out of your head and into a form where priorities become visible. 

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan — for what happens when one of those distant-horizon ideas finally acquires legs and needs to become an actual article.

Managing Bibliography by Spreadsheet — my other spreadsheet habit: a 30-day system for turning a prospective bibliography into a reading plan and making progress visible.

Writing is Momentum — on why idea-generating, blogging, listing, and generally keeping in contact with your own thinking all count as part of the writing process.