How to write speaker notes

Watch someone present from a full script and you can hear the exact moment they stop talking to the room and start reading. The eyes drop, the rhythm flattens, and the sentences get longer than any spoken sentence should be. The notes are doing the opposite of their job.

Notes are not a script

A slide, a script and a note are three different documents and they should not be written in the same voice.

The slide is for the audience, and it should be sparse. Amy Esselman’s argument is that a deck asked to serve as a live presentation, a pre-read and a reference at once ends up “forced into compromises that mean it doesn’t fully satisfy any of them”, and her recommendation for live delivery is to “keep slides sparse so the audience focuses on you and your spoken narrative”. Y Combinator says the same thing from the design side: one idea per slide, obvious at a glance.

The note is for you, and it exists to restart you when you lose the thread. That is a much smaller job than writing out what you are going to say. Anything you can say without prompting does not need to be written down at all, and every extra sentence in the note is a sentence you might read.

The four-line pattern

Four lines per slide, in this order.

Open. The first sentence, written out in full. This is the one place a script helps, because the opening words of a slide are where hesitation shows. On the cover of the conference talk deck, the note is the claim itself said aloud, not “welcome, my name is”.

Point. The single thing this slide asserts, as a fragment. Slide three of that deck is one number, eleven hours and forty minutes to restore service. The point line is “eleven forty, and nobody owned the clock”. Six words, and it is enough.

Proof. The evidence you must not get wrong: the figure, the source, the date. Slide four separates the reported cause of the outage from the three things that actually cost the time, so the proof line lists those three in order. Numbers go here in digits, because digits are easier to find on a glance.

Bridge. The sentence that hands over to the next slide, written out in full like the opener.

Forty words all in. If a slide needs more, split the slide.

Writing the bridge

The bridge is the line most people skip and the one that does the most work. The University of North Carolina’s writing centre puts it plainly in its guide to speeches: use especially strong transitions, because that is how listeners see how new information relates to what they have already heard. A reader can glance back up the page. A listener cannot.

A bridge names what just happened and what comes next. “So the postmortem found three causes, and only one of them was technical. Here is what we changed.” It is two sentences, it is boring to write, and it is the difference between a talk that moves and a talk that is a list of slides.

The conference deck has a structural version of the same idea: two chapter dividers, at slides two and five, each an oversized number and a five word title. A divider is a bridge you do not have to remember, which is why section dividers are worth their slide count in any talk over ten minutes.

Timing marks and cues

Put a running clock in the notes, not a duration. “07:00 by here” is checkable against a watch; “3 minutes” requires arithmetic while you are talking.

Mark them on the structural slides only. In a nine slide talk that means the cover, each divider and the close, which gives you four checkpoints and no maths. If you are behind at the second divider, you know before the last section rather than during it. To set the marks in the first place, read the talk aloud once with a timer, or estimate from your word count with the speaking time calculator and correct it after the first rehearsal.

Cues for the room go in the same place. “Pause here”, “ask for hands”, “the pen is on this slide” if you plan to draw on it live. Toastmasters’ advice on preparing a speech is to rehearse frequently and to use a timer while doing it, which is the only way these marks ever become accurate.

Where notes travel and where they do not

The table under this article is the full list, and there are two entries worth reading twice.

The first is that notes do not appear in any export. Not the PDF, not either PowerPoint export. If you send a deck to somebody who will present it, they get the slides and none of your notes, so the handover has to happen somewhere else.

The second is the opposite problem. A share link returns the slides with their notes attached, and the notes toggle is not disabled for viewers, so anyone with the link can press N and read them. Until that changes, write notes on any shared deck as though the audience will see them.

Rehearsing from notes

Rehearse from the pop-out window, not from the editor. It opens as a second browser window titled Speaker notes, carrying the note plus the slide number and total, and it is the same view you will have on the night. Rehearsing in the builder trains you to look at a canvas that will not be there.

Two passes are enough for most talks. The first is out loud with the timer, marking every place you went looking for a word. The second is with the notes deliberately closed, which tells you which four line notes are actually load-bearing and which ones you wrote out of anxiety. Delete the second kind.

The example

The conference talk deck is nine slides, two of which are chapter dividers, and every content slide carries one idea. That is what makes a four line note possible: there is nothing on any slide that needs a paragraph to explain.

For what the notes pane can and cannot do, see speaker notes and the shorter definition page. If you are writing notes for a session rather than a talk, the training deck structure changes what belongs in them.