I enjoyed Simon Kuper’s piece on how to survive a conference (“How to survive a conference: don’t say things that are obviously true”, Opinion, Magazine, FT Weekend, April 30). My own pet conference peeve is when a member of the audience stands up, ostensibly to ask a question and instead makes a speech.

I recall the pithy advice given by a business school professor when opening the Q&A session at an annual alumni conference. With piercing effectiveness, he reminded us that: “A question is a sentence that ends with a question mark.”

Eithne Kennedy
Singapore