Thursday, April 23, 2009

Comments about Comments

I meant to mention something about this last time: commentators are not doing quite what is typically expected. That's my fault for not being clearer as we've gone along — I'm not holding it against you — but you should know how it's done.

Commentary is not generally interactive; they are not a series of questions. Rather, comments are delivered to the speaker first in writing, in the form of a narrative. This narrative may, of course, contain questions or requests for clarification for the speaker, but it should not need to await those answers to make sense. You might think of the commentary as the beginnings of a reply paper (like Lange 2004, for example).

There will be numerous examples of commentary at the upcoming INPC, if you'd like to see some examples of this. For those of you with professional academic aspirations, volunteering to be commentators at conferences such as this is a good way of getting your foot in the door, so to say.

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