Who is the audience of your presentation? Are you presenting at a subject-specific conference or symposium where everyone in the audience is a member of a single field or academic discipline? In this case, you can include some subject-specific terminology with the assumption that your audience has a baseline understanding of your topic's background. For example, if you are presenting a paper on new alcohol research in teens at a conference on alcohol research, you can assume your audience is familiar with scientific methods of study and collection in that area.

Or are you presenting at a more general and/or interdisciplinary conference or symposium? In this case, your audience may come from a variety of academic backgrounds so it is best to assume they know nothing about your topic when editing your paper. Subject-specific terminology should be defined and you should prepare brief descriptions for any concepts that may be unknown. When in doubt, always over-explain. For example, if you are presenting the same paper from above on new alcohol research in teens at a conference displaying graduate research across all disciplines, you cannot assume that your audience is going to know what gene marking is. 

Where is your presentation taking place? Will you be in a lecture hall where you can provide images and other visual material for your audience to look at? Or will you be in a conference room with no projector? Will you have a microphone? Is the event a circulating one where you should expect audience members to come in and out of the room during your presentation, or will there only be a single presentation at a time? If there are multiple presentations running concurrently, how will you keep your audience's attention? Some of this information you may have to get from the organizer of the conference or symposium you will be attending. 

Alternatively, this portion of the module can be completed using Generative AI either exclusively or in tandem with completing the activity on your own as a second opinion. The following prompt can be pasted into any LLM of your choice, with the edits suggested:

"Read the paper I have attached and suggest portions to cut from the paper to make it [INSERT NUMBER] pages long while keeping the core argument. Go through the paper paragraph-by-paragraph. [PICK ONE: Focus on one example to support the core argument. (--for specific case study papers) // Focus on the paragraphs that provide an overview of the paper's argument with brief supporting examples. (--for wide overview papers)] Do not add any new text to the paper. Do not edit any of the text already in the paper. Only use the text and words already in the paper. Present the suggestions of which paragraphs to keep or edit/delete as a table with two columns: paragraphs to keep on the right and paragraphs to edit/delete on the left. Provide a brief justification for keeping or editing/deleting each paragraph in the table."

Where text is in brackets '[]', fill in the text. This prompt is designed to produce a completed 'Paragraph Splitter' assignment table, though some variation may occur. The prompt is also designed to not add or change any text in your paper, only identify potential paragraphs to keep or edit/delete in your presentation. Be sure to upload your original paper in the prompt. You do not need to include the figures or images.

Recommendations

Any LLM platform can be used to complete this activity, but I highly recommend a platform with data privacy to ensure your research is not scrapped. Certain tiers of LLM platforms such as ChatGPT or Claude include these privacy protections. Additionally, UNC has its own LLM 'sandbox' called PromptLab that allows UNC-affliated users to work with various LLMs within a data-secure space.