You are not obliged to note what you hear in the same order as you hear it, and if you stick to the structures and layout explained in Part 1 you will have some room for manoeuvre. You can allow yourself to remember what is easy to remember, noting it later or not at all, and write down quickly what is more difficult to remember without getting your notes in a muddle.

Noting detail sooner

Things which are difficult to remember and might be noted down as soon as you hear them, (and not in the same order you heard them) : what to note and include, names, dates, numbers and technical terminology

. Whether a given detail is important or not in the context of a speech is something you have to work out for yourself.

Example (Hodgson)

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the Minister of Energy, Science, Fisheries and a few other things including climate change policy. It's that Iast one that has taken me up close and personal with dairy farmers and brought me the invitation to speak hare today.

When you hear this, you would be well advised to skip the words For those of you who don't know me, I'm the... and start noting the hiat of areas for which be is the responsible minister, as this is likely to be more important, It will be easy to remember that he is a Minister, so we start by noting his areas of competence, then later we add Minister. Start that list of areas of competence towards the right of the page so that you can add rest on the left, in the SVO set up, later. So your notes will look like this, 

and then you continue. Below I have marked the chronological order in which these elements are noted in square brackets [ ].

Word order

The same applies in inflected languages like German and Polish where stylistic inversions of the normal Subject Verb Object word order are common. In this case you should note these elements in the order you hear them, BUT change their position on the page so that you still have SVO from left to right on your pad. Otherwise you risk making a mistake in your rendition of the speech.

The speaker's word order may be Object Verb Subject but our notes still look like this. You will have noted the elements im the order you heard them (given in square brackets [1]), but positioned them on the page as below.

Example (Buzek)

To whasnie od tempa prac dostosowawczych bedzie zalezal w duzej mierze postep negocjacji, a, co za tym idzie, takze data przystapienia Polski do Uni Europejskiej.

Literally in English this reads,

On the speed of harmonisation will depend to a great extent the progress in the negotiations and therefore also Poland's data of accession to the European Union