Dori wrote:
> As I have been reviewing for a lot of conferences lately, interesting
> questions have arisen regarding the role of the double-blind peer reviewed
> conference proceedings paper versus the "paper" presentation versus the
> double-blind peer reviewed journal article: <snip>

I think that the important thing here is the level of completeness, 
confidence and significance of the work. A journal will look for high 
levels of all three, a conference is likely to accept  work in progress 
where some initial conclusions have been drawn or interesting 
propositions identified, or the work may be complete but this is the 
first attempt to formalise it.

But that does not mean that the requirements of academic writing can be 
ignored, it is always necessary to write clearly and precisely with 
sound use of sources.

And if papers are to be published in refereed proceedings (which seems 
to be the bottom line for many universities when deciding whether to 
fund attendance) the presentation is a separate issue. The conference 
committee may accept the paper for inclusion but the audience at the 
conference decide whether your presentation is successful. If it is they 
will take an interest in your work, they may read it and cite it and 
they may wish to get involved with you as a colleague. Do a poor 
presentation and you may sink without trace. Too many researchers forget 
that the presentation is just as important as the paper and a different 
kind of challenge that cannot be assessed in advance by peer reviewers.

I once saw an excellent presentation at a science conference - the 
presenter had developed a complex mathematical model of the human skull. 
He started by showing a very complicated diagram full of coloured lines 
and numbers and said: "Here's our model of the human skull, impressive 
isn't it? You can read all about it in the paper so right now I'll 
explain why we did it and what it is useful for."

That is not a prescription - he decided that "why?" and "what for?" were 
the important issues for his research, we each need to think about what 
the audience need to know about our work to justify taking a deeper 
interest, but I have seen plenty of cases where researchers have managed 
to set out the complete story in 20 minutes, they just left out the 
detailed arguments, data, sources etc that validate the work and can be 
found in the paper, on the other hand, in the social context of the 
conference, often they were able to convey a much better sense of what 
the work was about since we "read" things in speech and body language 
than cannot be expressed easily in text.

Best wishes
Chris