Hi everyone,

There have been several questions about using notes for speeches.  In this article, you see my speech, then the actual notes I used, and then some thoughts on using notes.

The Speech:

My Notes:

Here is a screen shot of my notes from my phone:

Now let's look at how those notes come together

The note is designed to be one "page" on a phone or laptop.  I tend to not use notes at the onset of a speech so having to find where I am in my notes becomes a problem.  With one "page" I don’t have to scroll to find where I am.

I try to make the notes one-line-per-speech-group.  I didn’t succeed here (it would be easier on anything other than a phone).   Having one line per speech group is necessary with phone notes.  With laptop or paper notes, it means your eyes are always going to the same place and never having to scan from the end of one line to the start of the next in order to get your next thought.  Since I didn't fit everything on one line here, the letters at the left of each line serve as a back-up.

Some things about the format:

• The way I get it to shorter lines is to use ellipses (…) to take out minor parts that I don’t need to include. Examples are lines L and N.

• Key phrases are in ALL CAPs. You could write each sentence out, but really you’ll only need to use a few key words and phrases.  The longer wording (not in caps) is security for you - good to know that it’s there if needed but you probably will not use it.

• I use [brackets] for something I’m going to insert.  For example, in line G I know those stories so all I do is insert "[stories]".  If the detail of the story is important to remember you’d do regular-kine, not this [bracket] thing.

• In line L you’ll see “(Counter to)”. If I want to convey an idea (in this example, that it’s counter to what one would expect) but I don’t want to use those words or I want to stretch it out, parentheses say “convey this in different words”.

• Underlining is not about emphasis. Rather, it is to separate the speech into its ‘speech chunk’ sections.  If I printed it out, I would use a line on the page to separate and label the sections.

• I could have also indented lines J-N.

If you want to modify this approach to your own purposes, you could use italics, different fonts, etc.  I would keep it relatively simple as you don’t want to have to figure out your notes up there.

At the very bottom you can see it goes off the screen a little.  That’s a space for facts and verbatim quotes.  People don’t mind you reading those.  If I need to do that, I can look at the letter where I leaving off (“section F”) so I can get back to where I was quickly.

For people that heard my memory system (a speech a while back): here I wanted to be able to refer to lines in the notes for examples.  To use the number system with this, I’d only use 10 or fewer labels.  That means some areas would not have a number.  I would indent those so that the section as a whole was aligned.

Lines Q-S are my conclusion.  Generally with speeches I will have memorized my opening and my ending.  I did 'all caps' here to show how three sentences in a row of all caps destroys its usefulness.  You could, however, use all caps for entire sentences that you want to say exactly as written (you could also use quote marks like I do in line A in my notes).

It is best to print your notes out.  Paper is easier for you visually.  For print, there’s no harm in having more than one page (I just did one page here for demo purposes).  Keep the sections together and not break them across pages.  Make the page numbers prominent, ideally on both the top and bottom of the page.  Finally, it’s better not to staple the pages so you can go through the pages more easily.

Other Systems

For printed notes there is also the three-column technique (your notes would be in landscape for this):

Another option is to use an index card system.  You could do the same things I did above to create a short summary note for each card.  Save a large corner on each card and the last thing you do for prep is to number each card prominently.