paper-to-podiumlisted

# Paper to Podium Turn an academic paper into a talk that a real person can stand up and deliver: a spoken script timed to the minute, slides distilled from that script, and the small finishing touches (page-turn cues, a print-ready script) that make the difference between reading notes off a screen and actually presenting. This skill encodes one strong opinion, validated over many iterations of real talks: **The script is the talk. The slides are an excerpt of the script — never the other way around.** If you start with slides, you end up with dense bullet pages that the speaker reads aloud while the audience reads ahead. If you start with the script, the slides become what they should be: the few sentences and figures the audience should look at while the speaker talks. Every phase below follows from this. ## The workflow at a glance 0. **Intake** — pin down occasion, audience, duration, and extra requirements before writing a word. 1. **Read & research** — read the paper end to end; research the institutional and real-world background the paper assumes but doesn't spell out. 2. **Write the script** — to a length budget derived from the time limit, in plain spoken language. 3. **Distill the slides** — extract the load-bearing sentences and figures from the script; design for the back row. 4. **Visual QA loop** — render every page to an image and look at it; fix what looks off. Repeat. 5. **Verify** — a fact-check pass against paper and sources, a language proofread of