We received a mail from a student asking for help regarding note making and speech writing. Probably due to a typo, we missed her Email ID and ended up with no way to reach her. So, we decided to publish this article online so that not only Arushree but also other students get some help.
For general reading purpose, I suggest you to go through Learn Note making, Note making (The CBSE way) & How to write articles, essays and speeches.
I’ll explain you in detail how to write notes and then there’s a little information about speech writing towards the end of this article. Bear with such a lengthy article, I tried my best to trim it down and here it is.
Note making is definitely one of the most dreaded topics amongst students. I’ve personally been through all this and I can say it’s rather simple as compared to the hype it has among students.
You’ve been knowingly or unknowingly making notes since a very long time. Do you remember when you used to write important points while your teacher was teaching you something? It’s the same thing, the only difference lies in the fact that you don’t have a teacher teaching you something but you’re given an excerpt from where you’ll need to make your notes.
I’ll brief you about the general method to attack any note making problem in examinations. Here you go:
Let’s plan our attack first; there are generally three steps involved in note making.
Step 1: Grasp the main idea behind the article
Step 2: Understand the organization of content
Step 3: Make notes
Step 1: Grasp the main idea behind the article
The easiest part of all, the title does 90% of the job but just to be on a safer side, skim through the article once and try to capture the main idea behind it. Skimming means reading it as if you are reading a newspaper.
Step 2: Understanding the organization of content
Now comes the difficult part of note making, take my word for it and just go through this. I assure you there isn’t anything difficult after this. It’s all writing afterwards.
Slowly get into more depth of the article. Concentrate on the article and forget anything that is around you, even if someone tries to flirt with you, leave him/her, you got plenty of time later. Underline all the difficult sentences, reread them and even after trying hard, you find them hard to crack, LEAVE such sentences.
The difficult part is over and you just won your battle with note making. Knowingly or unknowingly you have mastered the article. By now, you already know the main idea behind the article and author’s organization of content.
Step 3: Make notes
Simply extract all the information YOU think will lead you to recreate this article just by looking at your notes, Jot them down in the specified format and Bingo! You’re done!
The essential part of note making is to get familiar with the article as much as you can. Read it at least twice even for an easier article, that way you minimize the risk of losing important points.
Follow this plan and let me know if you find any improvements in the way you deal with note making.
UPDATE: Print-friendly PDF document containing quick help on note making available now, CLICK HERE.
Speech writing
Now coming to the speech writing, it’s pretty straightforward and we attack it directly – the warrior way!
Firstly, make sure you’re equipped with all the famous quotes which sound great! Even if you get a topic for which you are unable to quote something, make up your own, that’s how I used to do and I must say I’ve never been disappointed with it nor were my teachers. Just say some unknown guy told it, as no one has the time enough to check its authenticity (WARNING: don’t use famous names like Einstein, Newton or APJ Abdul Kalam).
The rest is pretty simple. Think for a while and decide how you will go through the speech.
Give introduction about the topic in the first paragraph, something really interesting so that the reader gets compelled to read further. The rest is in your hands, collate your ideas and don’t worry about language, you can write it as if you are talking to someone. And also end it with style!
