2025 Advice to Commenters

Commentators are an essential part of the workshop, and the excellent discussions they have sparked are a large part of the workshop’s continuing success. It has also been nice to see that the interactions between commentators and authors before and after the workshop have been helpful to both parties, and in some cases have led to fruitful collaborations on other projects! To keep that success going, and to build institutional memory of best practices for commentators, the organizers have collected tips based on good commentaries in previous years.

• Keep it short so that most of the session can be used for group discussion of the paper. Ideally a commentary should be 10 minutes or less, and 15 minutes should be viewed as a hard limit.
• Some light summary to remind everyone of the paper is good, but a full re-presentation is unnecessary as all the attendees have read the papers.
• Keep the focus on the paper – orient your comments towards the author or towards opening up questions to discussion with the larger group rather than sketching out an alternative account of your own.
• You don’t need to make a lot of points – 2 or 3 questions are more than enough to get something going. You don’t need to tell the author everything you think about the paper. Instead, focus on the best or most interesting thing you can bring to the table rather than a list of comments and questions that can be overwhelming.
• Once the general discussion starts, step back to let other people have an opportunity to comment or ask questions. That said, it is a good idea to keep a few extra questions in your back pocket for the general discussion in case the conversation lags.
• Don’t use a PowerPoint for commentary. Getting it started can eat up time, and we find it changes the way participants engage with the session by turning them into observers. Better to keep the session in a conversational mode.
• Literature suggestions can be helpful in emails with the author before or after the presentation as they develop the paper. During the talk, however, they tend not to lead to a great conversation. Instead, focus on talking together here and now.
• In general, feel free to share more extensive thoughts with the author of the paper over email. Online conferences sometimes lack the opportunity to get to know new people or talk one-on-one about someone’s talk, so extended conversation via email before and after the workshop is a way to compensate for that.
• It is also a good idea to let the author know in advance what questions you’ll be asking in your commentary so that they have time to think about their responses. This ends up making the session go better for all involved.