My lecture notes have disappeared.
By which I mean: my older notes (from, say, a decade or so ago and more) tend to be extremely full. They lay out all my projected comments, often in complete sentences--in other words, the notes are intended to be read. As I've stuck around, though, I have stopped reading notes; instead, the notes are clusters of page numbers, with brief comments on what I want to highlight, arranged according to projected discussion topic. I know what I want to say and where I want to go, but I've found that I prefer to lecture in collaborative mode--working through the text with the students--and writing out notes in full tends to preclude the flexibility that requires. For poetry, I have extensive marginal notes and move through the text that way.
This is not a prescriptive strategy ("what you must do to engage with students"). It's not something I would have been comfortable with at all at the beginning of my career, but rather something I arrived at over the course of two decades. Other colleagues prefer to outline, or prepare more extensive notes, or rely on more elaborate discussion protocols. Every approach has its uses and pitfalls (try doing discussion on a day when no student has completed the reading...); there's nothing to do but experiment and, perhaps, change over time. Which I suppose is another way of saying that the overuse of imperatives in pedagogical discussion is not much help.
