Here’s a strange but interesting question, which is hopefully useful too.
What’s the ideal amount of notes to take from a lecture, workshop or talk?
This goes for whether you’re the presenter, or sitting there in the audience listening.
I’m thinking here the session is an hour long, so what would you say would be the right amount of notes to take?
A page? Two pages? Three pages? Even four?
I’ve spent the week at the wonderful Swanwick Writers’ Summer School, happily reinstated this year after the tyranny of that thing we won’t mention.
I had time to go to a few talks, as well as giving a course of my own, and I think I’ve come to a conclusion about the right amount of notes.
Some of the sessions I went to left the audience with several A4 pages full of words.
You couldn’t criticise the speaker for failing to pack in the information, but...
How much of that would you really take in?
Plus the price of conveying such a large amount of information was a lack of interactions.
And I strongly believe that you learn best by doing, rather than just listening.
My simple trick for teaching is to outline a point, explore some examples, then set an exercise to put the learning into practice.
It’s a principle which has always worked well for me, and I think greatly helped me to get on here in Cambridge.
It also means the course has lots of variety, which I think helps to retain the attention.
When I first started teaching, I used to carefully time the sessions to make sure they were an hour long.
These days I don’t, partly because of experience, but mostly because I’ve realised that one A4 page outline lasts exactly an hour.
(For example, the picture shows an hour of my course from Swanwick, on clarity of characterisation.)
Outline a point... explore some examples... put it all into action in an exercise.
So, to the punchline, and would you believe it…
Because here comes the symmetry, the twist, and the reveal all in one…
My little experiment in taking notes at Swanwick concluded that exactly the right amount of information to come away with was one page of A4.
With that amount I felt I had learnt plenty, experienced a lot, and also enjoyed the session.
Just a small thought, and yes, maybe an odd one, but I hope useful for potential presenters everywhere.