>> Another Item in the Freelance Linguist's Survival Kit: Seminars
Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D.
(ocls@ipa.net)
Almost everything linguists know that can be discussed with nonlinguists is a potential seminar topic. The demand for seminars is enormous, especially in the many fields for which a number of hours of training are obligatory every year. Seminars have been the backbone of my personal finances for the past seventeen years, and I recommend them wholeheartedly as a way to survive without an academic position. You need almost no capital to start your own seminar business, and your Ph.D. is your badge of entry.
There are two kinds of seminars (also called workshops, also called "trainings," depending):
(1) You are booked to do a seminar by a client who provides the audience and takes care of all the arrangements; all you have to do is prepare the materials and do the teaching. You are paid a fee for your services and reimbursed for your travel expenses. (When the client is a bureaucracy you will be paid a fee that is negotiated to include your expenses.)
(2) You put on the seminar yourself, which means that you have to take care of all the arrangements, do all the marketing, and handle every detail from start to finish. This is a great deal more work, but is potentially more lucrative, since you aren't limited just to a fee.
Any of the books on the subject will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how this is done; it would be absurd for me to duplicate their information here. Instead, I will provide you with three warnings, one recommendation, and a brief description of what I do.
First Warning: Don't join a national seminar outfit like Fred Pryor Seminars. Doing that is exactly like holding down a part-time teaching post at three different colleges. You have a Ph.D., and you know how to teach; you don't have to do piecework.
Second Warning: Don't try to do a seminar on some broad general topic -- like "Improving Your Communication Skills." Seminars like that are filled on the basis of nationwide mailings for which one signup per one hundred letters mailed is considered a very successful marketing campaign. Choose a specific and narrow niche, the narrower the better, and stick to it.
Third Warning; If you put on your own seminars, always require preregistration, with a cutoff date far enough in advance so that you can cancel your arrangements if the seminar doesn't fill, and so that you will know how many participants you have to prepare for.
Recommendation: Always, unless you're presenting for a client who refuses to allow it, have a sales table, if you have any sort of printed materials or tapes to sell. My sales table, which is staffed by my husband, often brings in large sums; the books on seminars will tell you that a good sales table will at least double your money. I have commercial books and audiotapes to sell (purchased from Ingram at 40 percent off retail), but the real profit is in selling your own materials. For example, I have steady sales for a roughly fifty-page inhouse publication called "Language in Emergency Medicine," which is in an 81/2-by-11 inch photocopy format with paper cover and spiral binding. It's tailored specifically for EM doctors and staff, answers the questions they always ask me in seminars, and does a brisk traffic. (If you want more information about doing your own published materials, you can reach me by email -- ocls@ipa.net.) If you don't have anyone to staff a sales table, bring along display copies of what you want to sell, supply order blanks with your seminar handouts, and take orders home to fill by mail; don't try to both do the seminar and do sales yourself.
EXAMPLE -- What I Do
I do verbal self-defense seminars. In the late 60s I assembled a large corpus of examples of American English verbal combat -- arguments, altercations, verbal disputes of all kinds. I analyzed it as you would any such body of data, and turned the patterns that I found there into a grammar of English verbal violence. My seminars are based on that material. The goals of my seminars are always the same: (1) to teach the participants how to establish a language environment in which verbal abuse and verbal violence almost never happen; and (2), in the rare cases when verbal abuse and verbal violence cannot be avoided, to teach them how to deal with the problem efficiently, effectively, and with no loss of face on either side. My specialty is verbal self-defense for medical professionals -- doctors, nurses, hospital staffs, administrators, therapists, and the like. When a client from some other field approaches me and offers a booking, I take it if it interests me and can be fit into my schedule -- but I only actively seek bookings in the medical field. Medical professionals are extremely interested in improving their ability both to avoid verbal violence and to deal with it when they can't avoid it; more than 3/4 of all malpractice suits today are not for what the medical professional does but for what the medical professional says or fails to say. (And when it comes to finding clients, all the medical professionals are right there in the yellow pages; they don't have to be hunted for.)
For selling seminars to medical clients, I have a letter explaining why the presentation is needed, plus a one-page outline, plus my "speaker kit" -- which tells the potential client what my fees are, what I will and will not do, what I need in the way of equipment, and so on. Before I send that anywhere, I call the hospital or medical school or other facility and ask to speak to the director of continuing education and/or inservice training. When I have the director on the line, I ask if I may send her or him the materials; if I get permission, I send them; a week later, I call again to ask whether the material has arrived. Unless you do this, you might just as well drop your materials in the wastebasket yourself and save postage. Things I will do -- for example, an audience of eight hundred physicians is just fine with me, and I always provide extensive question-and-answer periods -- are in my sales materials. Things I won't do -- for example, my postpolio syndrome means I can't stand at a podium and I can't "work a room" with microphone in hand, so those are out, and I won't do a seminar that's less than roughly three hours long -- are in my sales materials. That way, the client knows exactly what to expect.
For presenting material from linguistics to audiences with no linguistic background -- even if, like medical professionals, they have advanced degrees -- you have to be prepared to simplify to a degree that may amaze you. This doesn't mean cutting corners and it doesn't mean talking down. It does mean that the more of the really basic stuff you can put on your seminar handout the better, so that you don't have to keep repeating it.
Finally, every now and then I do an "institute" at which I train other people to do these seminars; it runs several days and includes a demonstration of at least two different verbal self-defense seminars, a day of theory and practice (including basis linguistic theory for nonlinguists), and the usual social things. There is certainly an opportunity for linguists who have developed seminars of their own to train other linguists to present them, prepare materials, and the like, in just that same fashion.
If I can provide any additional information, I'll be happy to do so. I'm busy enough that it may take me a week or so to get back to you, but I will answer any queries you care to send along.
Maintained by Sally Morrison.