I’m speaking at a conference at 7 am tomorrow, and I didn’t even remember the topic of the talk (or whether it’s on Spain or Central America) until two minutes ago.
I don’t write “conference talks” and I don’t recommend people do it at all, especially if they don’t have a million publications. Write articles, submit them for publication, and then you’ll be able to cull any number of talks out of texts that will be already written and a lot less tentative and confusing than whatever you write purposefully as “a conference talk.”
The genre of “conference talk” in the Humanities should die a painful death as soon as possible. We end up with crowds of people who have dozens of these “talks” that never turned into actual research.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is good advice.
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Although: if, for instance, you need to get to the MLA to interview, and the only way to get funded is to give a talk, and if giving a talk is also good so people interviewing you can also see you speak if they wish, then you’ve got to craft a talk JUST for the panel you’re applying to since it’s a competitive venue to get into. This doesn’t mean you can’t use the technique described here — just that it’s irritating when people aren’t speaking to panel, but are just reading aloud something pre-written for another purpose and only vaguely related here.
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There are no more MLA interviews. That practice is long-gone. People do Zoom interviews and Zoom “campus visits.” This was true even before the pandemic. The last time my university sent a search committee to the MLA was in 2008.
And it’s not just poor miserable places. I interviewed with a fancy school in 2018, and it was all Skype.
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It’s been the case for many years. My point is: if you need to get to whatever conference for business reasons, this imperative can really twist what you decide to work up. The old advice of the conference paper as a step toward the article was never good.
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REPLY TO: Enough with the Talks
Another way that Humanities and mathematics are different, I guess. I have found over the years that conference talks in which I introduce new unsolved problems, providing research opportunities to young people has greatly enhanced my reputation, probably as much as my own publications. Looking back on it, I started doing this in part because similar talks gave me a large number of new problems to work on, which was a big help when I was an assistant professor..
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