ABSTRACT
You have now reached an important stage in the progression towards a notetaking system. You have now met and practised the fundamentals of a notetaking system based on the notes of practising professionals. If you put this book down now and read no further, you will still be armed with a sound basis, tried and tested by many colleagues, for your future note-taking in consecutive interpreting. In this short chapter we will see how to move from noting from text to paper to the real thing. The chapter is divided into three parts:
Taking notes directly Reproducing speeches from notes Note-taking from the spoken word
If you are comfortable with the techniques introduced so far and have practised them so that they come more or less automatically to you, you are now ready to take full notes directly, skipping the intermediate stages of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 and taking notes directly onto your notepad. There are a number of benefits to taking notes from texts of speeches before taking notes from the spoken word. There is no time pressure as with the spoken word, so you have more time to work out how you can best and most clearly note something. It also means you can correct as you go along, tear out a page and start it, but not the whole speech, again. This means that you will be practising what you would like to note, your ideal notes, your ‘fair copy’, not practising a hurried set of improvised notes. In turn this set of ideal notes will become ingrained through practice, and so when you do move on to noting from the spoken word the good habits will have become automatic and will find their way into your notes taken at speed.
