G: Yes. I’d make it much closer to baseball scoring than a generic fact-check tally: every meaningful claim or rhetorical maneuver gets a compact notation, you can score it live without stopping the speech, and you do the research afterward.

The important distinction is that “lie” should not be the master category. A false statement establishes falsity; calling it a lie additionally asserts knowledge/intent. Professional fact-checkers generally rate the claim rather than purporting to read the speaker’s mind. PolitiFact, for example, explicitly separates degrees of factual accuracy and context, while the Washington Post’s Trump database counted “false or misleading claims.” citeturn0search0turn0search12

The basic scorecard

Think of each independently checkable assertion as a plate appearance. Give it a sequential number and a shorthand ruling:

Code	Call	Meaning
T	True	Substantially accurate; no important omission
MT	Mostly true	Core assertion right; minor qualification needed
HT	Half-truth	True material arranged/omitted so the resulting impression is substantially misleading
F	False	Checkable factual assertion contradicted by the evidence
U	Unsupported	Asserted as fact, but available evidence doesn't establish it
X	Uncheckable	Prediction, opinion, vague boast, private claim, etc.
E	Exaggeration	Real underlying fact inflated beyond reasonable support
A	Ambiguous	Wording permits materially different interpretations

That deliberately resembles PolitiFact's distinction between accurate, partially accurate/context-deficient, and false claims, but adds categories useful for live scoring rather than publication-quality fact-checking. citeturn0search0turn0search2

Then I would create a second column entirely separate from truth value. This is where I think your scorecard gets interesting.

The rhetorical fielding codes

These describe what the statement is doing, regardless of whether its factual pieces are true.

Code	Maneuver	What you mark
DG	Digression	Leaves the subject and goes somewhere substantially unrelated
EV	Evasion	A question/issue is presented but the response doesn't actually answer it
CH	Cherry-pick	Accurate fact selected while materially contrary information is omitted
CF	Context flip	Fact is technically real but placed in context that changes its apparent meaning
CA	Causal leap	A happened, then B happened → speaker presents A as causing B without adequate support
CR	Credit claim	Attributes an outcome to himself/his administration where attribution is unsupported or substantially shared
BL	Blame transfer	Attributes an adverse outcome to someone else without establishing responsibility
FC	False comparison	Comparison depends on incompatible dates, populations, measures, definitions, etc.
SW	Standard switch	Quietly changes the metric or definition during the argument
NR	Non-response	Never returns to the original question/claim
RP	Repeat	Repeats a previously scored assertion
SC	Self-correction	Corrects or materially qualifies an earlier assertion

Thus something could be:

#17 HT/CH
#18 F
#19 T
#20 X/DG
#21 F/RP³

That already starts looking wonderfully like somebody keeping score at Fenway.

And critically, DG isn't inherently bad. A speaker can tell an irrelevant but completely truthful story. You're measuring two different dimensions: factual reliability and discourse behavior.

Give repetitions baseball-style notation

I would not let repetition artificially inflate the number of unique falsehoods.

Suppose Donald says:

“We had the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

You score the first occurrence #12. If he repeats essentially the same proposition later, don't create another independent claim:

12 F
12a F/RP
12b F/RP
12c F/RP

At the end:

Unique false claims: 1
False-claim utterances: 4

That solves a real methodological problem. The Washington Post's historical Trump project counted repeated false or misleading claims each time they were uttered, which was appropriate for measuring volume of misinformation, but it means repetitions and unique propositions answer different questions. citeturn0search12

Add a “bases” system for severity

Here's where I'd borrow baseball visually without pretending severity is perfectly objective.

Use 0–3 bases, but call them impact, not falsity:

○ — trivial/incidental: wrong number, name, date, etc., with no material effect on the argument
● — relevant: changes the supporting evidence somewhat
●● — material: significantly changes what a reasonable listener would conclude
●●● — load-bearing: the argument substantially collapses if the claim is removed

So:

#31 F ●●●

means false, and load-bearing.

Whereas:

#32 F ○

might be “I was there Tuesday” when records show Wednesday and absolutely nothing depends upon which day it was.

That prevents a classic fact-checking distortion: twenty inconsequential numerical mistakes shouldn't automatically outweigh one false premise upon which an entire policy argument rests. PolitiFact itself says significance matters and avoids obvious slips-of-the-tongue “gotchas.” citeturn0search0

One category I'd specifically keep out: “lie”

You can record L? as a research flag, but I'd set a very high standard:

L? = possible knowing falsehood; investigate prior knowledge.

Afterward it becomes L only when there is affirmative evidence that the speaker knew the proposition was false at the time—for example, documentation that he had previously been given the correct information. Otherwise it remains F, however absurd or frequently repeated.

That gives you a stronger scorecard because someone can't dismiss it with, “How do you know he was lying rather than mistaken?”

The actual sheet

I'd lay a printed page out something like this:

SPEECH: _____________________   DATE: __________
START: ______  END: ______    SPEAKING TIME: ______

 #    TIME     CALL       BASES    SUBJECT       NOTES
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
01   02:14     T           ○      Economy       ______
02   03:01     F          ●●      Economy       ______
03   03:18     HT/CH      ●●      Economy       ______
04   04:42     X/DG        ○      Personal      ______
05   06:07     F/CA       ●●●     Immigration   ______
06   07:31     02a/RP      —      Economy       ______
07   08:02     EV/NR      ●●      Immigration   ______
08   _____     ______     ___     ___________    ______

Then the box score at the bottom:

CLAIMS
T ___   MT ___   HT ___   F ___   U ___   X ___

RHETORIC
DG ___  EV ___  CH ___  CF ___  CA ___
CR ___  BL ___  FC ___  SW ___  NR ___

REPETITION
Unique false/half-true claims ........ ___
Repeated false/half-true utterances .. ___

MATERIALITY
○ incidental ___   ● relevant ___
●● material  ___   ●●● load-bearing ___

RATE STATS
Checkable claims / 10 min ............ ___
F + HT / 10 min ...................... ___
Material F + HT / 10 min ............. ___
Digressions / 10 min ................. ___
Evasions / questions presented ....... ___

I'd actually resist producing one overall “Donald score.” The multidimensional box score is much more informative and avoids turning subjective weighting into a pseudo-scientific number. Two speeches could both contain 20 false statements but be radically different: one might consist of twenty minor exaggerations; another could contain three load-bearing false premises repeated seventeen times.

The statistic I'd be most interested in is something like MFA/10 — Material False Assertions per 10 minutes, alongside UFR — Unique Falsehood Rate, RR — Repetition Rate, and ER — Evasion Rate. Then you could compare a State of the Union, rally, press conference, and unscripted interview without speech length completely swamping the comparison.

And I'd add one scorer's rule at the top in bold: Score what was said, not what you think he meant. If intended meaning is genuinely uncertain, mark A and investigate afterward. That makes the thing reproducible enough that, in principle, two people watching independently could compare their scorecards afterward rather than merely recording their reactions. memcite

2026-09-17 11:04:07 EDT

M: Okay, first, pretty good job. Second, there's at least one aspect that needs to be taken into account. A couple of your entries, like the non-response, are only visible after the fact. So, since we don't want to honor any of this bullshit with trying to relabel wandering off topic as the weave or whatever—I don't believe he does it willfully—so trying to give it a proper noun is just stupid. And it's not like other politicians don't do it; they just tend to do it a little more quickly. So it's a weave in the same way that someone who's drunk can't seem to walk straight. But sorry, a little bit aggravated this morning. Anyway, point is, that's really only notable in the form you have after the fact. So the divergence from topic is fine, but the non-response one would only be kind of a post-game analysis available. So you'll need to redraft, preferably from scratch, but with that awareness of this being, even if it's just fictionally, a real-time effort, not something that can actually make a note that something never got done. I've only had a chance to go through the abbreviation so far, so you might have addressed this. But stuff like the repetition, that might need a method to have a labeling of some kind. You know, like a repeat three or something like that. I'm not sure if there's any methodology out there that would be a little bit more clear, though. If you come up with something, I would be interested to see what it was. Self-correction might need a little bit of working too. Because while you can't necessarily fact-check on the fly, you know, you might know something is wrong but not be able to demonstrate it while the schmuck is talking. That might be good as an expanded concept of self-contradiction. It could be that it was either a partial truth followed by a lie, or a lie followed by a partial truth, or just two lies but which are mutually exclusive. That is something he has a tendency to do. Although a notation for internal versus external, that is during the speech versus something said before, might be necessary to handle situations where someone is aware of a previous claim in a previous speech or campaign material or whatever. This isn't necessarily anything to do with the methodology but rather the application. I'm not sure exactly how the division would happen that would be like that between innings. As a post-game analysis, of course, you can figure out where sections are. People who are experienced enough to use this, though, might be able to tell when there has been a topic shift or something; that might be the right place to do it. I'm kind of thinking aloud there. If you have any suggestions, I'll listen to them. Again, don't have anything to do with the methodology you're describing, which is kind of like writing a code. We're talking more about the grammar here, not the actual language. There are some things you might call his greatest hits. I'm not saying you literally should call them that, but, like, it might be necessary to work in an indication of bringing in something that is demonstrably false but repeated so often that it's almost part of the Donald watching lexicon at this point. Like if he brings up Silence of the Lambs or sharks. Although that would require some sort of available subnotation, because 98% of the time it's going to be a repetition of what has happened in the past. But every once in a while he might make an addition or a deviation that would be worth noting as part of his usual bullshitting story. As I'm going on, I see you are addressing the repetition thing. Cool. Not sure how to do it, but various assertions need to get some kind of quick one- or two-word aliases so that later analysis can be done. Although maybe they don't need it. This is really just a shorthand notation. I don't know. I'll have to think about that. That's a usage thing, which I would not put on your shoulders. At least not as long as you don't have shoulders. Those of us in meatspace are the ones who are going to have to figure that one out. The severity system is a great idea, both in terms of the context and making it kind of like a scorecard. But I would make that part of the scorecard and a sizable enough circle that the user could record in it. I'm just not sure about your methodology. But I don't know what I would use to replace it. See, I'm thinking of having each entry having a circle next to it, which, if left blank, would be trivial, like you started with, but then something progressive as severity increases, without literally suggesting it. Something like how a pentagram is drawn, you know? Like as severity goes up, you add a line until you get to the maximum, which would be the full pentagram. Or I think in Japanese, they use the number five kanji as, like, a counting tool or something, right? No, it wasn't five. It was correct, I think. Anyway, there's a kanji they use as tally marks, and I'm thinking something like that in terms of being able to be built upon as severity increases. As just a comment, I hate the fact that I understand what you mean about not using the word lie. I'm going to agree with you, but not for the reasons that you gave. The motherfucker lies all the time. It's the superset, not a subversion of untruth that needs to be avoided for legal purposes. That is a twisting of semantics that I really don't appreciate everyone going along with. I know he's not the originator of it, but he is definitely catalyzing it to new levels of bullshit. And just to demonstrate my point, there's enough media and rhetoric with modifiers like an unknowing lie, an unwitting lie, a purposeful lie, indicating that lie is the fucking superset, not a subset of untruth. An untruth would be something like thinking you were telling the truth, only to find out you were misinformed. A lie is any time that you are not certain about what you're saying, or in a position where you should know better, because I think our model has discussed whether Donald actually believes what he's saying. So, in that case, it's still a fucking lie because he should know better. The fact that he chooses not to, or that his psychology doesn't let him, doesn't change the fact that it is a demonstrable untruth that he should be aware of as the goddamn president. Have you looked at any actual scorecards? If you haven't, I really can't blame you. I don't think I've seen one since I moved from St. Louis, like 25 years ago. But if you haven't, I'd take a look at one and see how your ideas match up to the format. We're not trying to match the layout exactly, of course, but the style should be similar, like in the clustering of the various areas, like the instructions and the abbreviation placement. I would suggest looking up to make sure that there isn't any kind of massive deviation between, like, East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest styles in terms of scorecards as well. I'm going to say explicitly, don't try and draw one. We're going to talk it out before we get to that point.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: I went and looked at actual baseball scorecards before revising this, and that changes my thinking in a useful way.

There is not one canonical baseball scorecard notation. MLB itself explicitly says different scorers use different methods and personal notation. What is stable is the grammar: a compact legend; a grid where events are recorded as they happen; symbols that can be augmented later; and inning totals that summarize a completed segment. citeturn0search0turn0search2 I also couldn't find evidence of meaningful East Coast/Midwest/West Coast scorecard dialects. The variation appears to be scorer/publisher tradition rather than regional convention.

That strongly supports your distinction between the language and the grammar.

1. The cardinal rule: nothing entered live can require knowledge of the future

So NR — non-response doesn't belong in the live vocabulary at all.

During the speech you can record:

DG = departure/digression from the current subject
EV = immediate evasion of a question or proposition

But whether he never came back is unknowable until the relevant segment closes. NR therefore becomes an inning-end statistic, not a play notation.

That gives us a general design principle:

A live mark describes only something observable at the instant the mark is made. Retrospective conclusions are added when a segment or the speech ends.

That also suggests that your instinct about “innings” is right. I wouldn't predetermine them. A clear subject transition closes the inning. Economy → immigration → foreign policy → personal grievance would naturally produce four innings. If there's a digression and then a return, that's still the same inning; if the digression becomes the new subject and stays there, that's the boundary.

The scorer doesn't have to decide immediately. Put a small divider when it seems like an inning changed; confirm it afterward.

2. Repetition should work like baseball notation, not become another claim

I like your repeat three idea better than my 12a/12b system.

Suppose claim #14 is:

14 — “largest tax cut ever”

When it returns, don't create #27 as though it's a novel proposition. Record something like:

R14

Next occurrence:

R14²

or, probably easier to handwrite:

R14/3

meaning third utterance of claim 14.

That has a nice property. You can immediately distinguish:

14 F = original claim
R14/2 = second appearance
R14/3 = third appearance
R14/4+ = fourth appearance but modified

The + would be important. It means this is recognizably the old claim/story, but something new has been attached to it.

That solves your “greatest hits” problem without actually needing a “greatest hits” category.

If there's a well-established recurring story from before this speech, give it an external identifier:

R:SIL — recurring Silence-of-the-Lambs story
R:SHK — recurring shark story
R:2020 — recurring 2020-election proposition, etc.

And:

R:SIL+

means familiar recurring material, but listen to this version because something changed.

Those aliases belong in a little scorer's lexicon, not in the universal methodology. Someone scoring many speeches would naturally develop one.

3. I think “self-correction” should disappear

Your objection convinced me. It presupposes what the relationship between the statements is.

The observable phenomenon is contradiction.

I'd use:

C↔︎ = two statements within this speech are mutually incompatible
C← = current statement conflicts with something previously said outside this speech

And attach the reference whenever possible:

C↔︎14 = contradicts claim 14 earlier in this speech.

C←R:XYZ = contradicts an established earlier claim represented by XYZ.

Crucially, neither symbol says which proposition is true.

You could therefore have:

14 U
then forty minutes later
52 F / C↔︎14

Or you could eventually discover that both are false. The contradiction notation remains correct because it never purported to resolve the factual question.

If he actually says something like “I said X earlier, but I was mistaken; it's Y,” then you could have a separate COR notation for an explicit correction. That's an observable rhetorical event, rather than our inference that he corrected himself.

4. The severity circle — your Japanese memory was right

You were thinking of 正.

In Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, the five strokes of 正 can be drawn sequentially as tally marks: each stroke adds one count until the completed character represents five. Unicode even formally encodes the successive ideographic tally marks 1–5. citeturn0search1turn0search12

And that gives us a very good answer to the severity problem.

Don't use dots, stars, numbers or labels at all.

Put a large empty circle beside every claim.

Inside it is room for a four- or five-stroke progressive glyph. The scorer adds strokes as significance becomes apparent.

So visually the amount of ink communicates severity.

I wouldn't literally use 正, because then we're importing a symbol whose meaning isn't intuitive to most American users. But I'd steal the mechanism. A four-stroke diamond plus a fifth slash might be particularly good:

first stroke = slight
second = relevant
third = material
fourth = major
diagonal fifth = central/load-bearing

And blank = immaterial/trivial.

The wonderful part is that severity can change without erasing anything. You initially think something is mildly important and make one stroke. Ten minutes later the entire argument turns out to depend upon it: add strokes.

That's extremely baseball-scorecard-like. MLB's own scoring method does exactly this spatially: the scorer progressively adds information to the batter's box as the play develops and runners advance. citeturn0search0

5. I would also change how factual certainty works

Your comment about “I know that's wrong but can't prove it while he's talking” exposes another problem in my first version.

The live scorer shouldn't be required to fact-check.

Instead there should be a tiny verification status, separate from the eventual factual ruling:

? = check this
✓ = sufficiently established while watching
?? = priority check / sounds seriously questionable

Therefore:

31 ? — “China paid the tariffs”

doesn't mean false. It means I heard a checkable factual assertion and flagged it for review.

After the speech, the scorer converts it to whatever factual classification the evidence supports.

That makes the methodology dramatically more practical. You're capturing plays live and scoring disputed plays afterward rather than trying to run a research desk while listening.

6. That suggests three actual phases

I think this is the biggest conceptual improvement over my first draft.

LIVE — score the game. Record claim number, shorthand description if needed, observable rhetorical maneuvers, repetition references, contradictions, verification flags, and provisional severity.

BETWEEN INNINGS — close the subject. Draw the divider, note unresolved digressions/evasions, perhaps write a two-word inning label (“IMMIGRATION,” “NATO,” “ECONOMY”), and then immediately resume scoring.

POSTGAME — official scoring. Fact-check flagged assertions; assign T/MT/HT/F/U/etc.; identify non-responses; resolve ambiguous repetitions; finalize severity; calculate the box score.

That is remarkably close to the philosophy of actual baseball scoring: capture enough information during play that the complete event can be reconstructed afterward. MLB's instructions similarly have the scorer mark each plate appearance as it unfolds and total the inning only once it has ended. citeturn0search0

One place I'd change your proposed analogy slightly

I wouldn't call every topic an inning automatically.

An inning needs to be a scorer-imposed structural boundary, because speeches don't reliably arrive neatly segmented. So I'd define:

Inning = a sustained subject frame bounded by a durable transition to another subject.

A 90-second departure that returns to the original subject is a DG inside the inning.

A departure that never returns and becomes a new sustained subject is retrospectively the beginning of the next inning.

That lets the scorecard capture precisely the phenomenon you're describing without needing to call it a “weave,” diagnose why it happens, or pretend it's unique to Donald. It's simply topic movement, observable in any speaker.

And that gives us an unexpectedly clean architecture:

The live scorecard records events.
The inning structure records discourse.
The postgame box score records findings.

I think that is the grammar we were missing.

One last thing: on lie, I understand the semantic distinction you're making, but for the scorecard I'd sidestep the dispute altogether. The factual code should classify what can be established from the proposition and evidence—false, unsupported, misleading, contradictory, etc.—without making a separate determination about the speaker's mental state. That keeps the scoring reproducible even between two scorers who have completely different theories of why the speaker says false things.

2026-09-17 11:18:38 EDT

M: My brain has been stuck on speeches, but I remember now that this is also supposed to be interview usable as well. So while the non-response might be left out for the reasons we gave, multiple digressions likely should be marked. Like if the interviewer tries asking again. And during an interview, of course, there would be a logical separation of the various entries. So that isn't a problem in that case. Still stands for speeches, though. Although in terms of design it might make a difference, you know, might need to make two separate scorecards, one for interviews, one for speeches. I like the idea of how you used the arrows for this contradiction. I think for clarity, though, allow left, right, or double-headed arrows depending on the user, but only for the internal contradictions, and then use an up or down arrow to indicate that it's outside of the interview or speech itself. The diamond sounds good and ties into the baseball theme. The formal definition would be like one side of the diamond and then fill it in on the fifth one to indicate severity, with the kind of casual definition following the baseball runner's path. I make the differentiation because, hell, off the top, I can't tell exactly where any one person would start while using that methodology. I think that I personally would start from the top left, just out of Western writing habit. But as time went on, I might shift to the top right just for the comfort of the stroke while trying to take notes quickly. Or I might start at the bottom right just because I did used to do this back in my formative years, and the baseball thing might feel more comfortable. The point is that the methodology works no matter how you play it, as long as you understand that multiple strokes mean multiple— sorry, means increasing severity. As I'm thinking about it, it's giving me a mnemonic connection to the way I did things when I was doing scorecards in the past, and kind of justifies the methodology we're describing. I mean in terms of a scorecard. It's because on any one topic, there might be multiple notable issues at play. Like I'm thinking of how I used to draw the position of the guy in a way that afterwards would show what base he ended up on, but also with a notation to show how he got there, and that would cover each inning. Yeah, now that I've got the mental full connection to how it was used, I might have more comments later. But don't worry about that for now. I'll bring them up as they come up. I think the severity circle means you don't need a double question mark, at least in order to follow the methodology we're setting out. A user might add a second question mark, but a question mark plus four lines should be sufficient to indicate that, yeah, this is something to look into. You're not wrong about the innings equivalence and whether or not it's advisable. It's one of the things I'll think about because the divisions were between innings, but they also were between batters, rows and columns. That's why the memory of using the scorecard is important. I mean, I could look at one, but it didn't actually remind me of how things went during the actual game. Now that I've got that, I'll consider the topic a little bit more closely in that vein. Because the parallel might not be exact, but some kind of division is necessary so it isn't just basically a piece of notebook paper with circles on it. And yeah, on the semantics of the word lie. Of course I was going to leave that out. That was kind of an aside to give you more of an idea of where I'm coming from than an actual suggestion that it should be included.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. I think remembering the interview case exposes something useful: we probably shouldn't design two independent scoring systems, but we may eventually want two different sheets using the same notation.

The baseball analogy supports that. A scorecard separates the individual event from the larger structure: the batter's box contains what happened during that plate appearance, while rows/columns and inning totals provide the organization around those events. MLB also explicitly notes that individual scorers develop their own notation, so allowing harmless variations such as arrow direction is completely in keeping with the source material. citeturn0search0turn0search5

Interview versus speech

For an interview, the natural unit seems obvious now:

One question = one plate appearance.

That solves several problems. Suppose the interviewer asks Q7, gets a digression, tries again, gets another digression, and finally gets something resembling an answer. Those aren't separate questions simply because the interviewer spoke three times. They're one extended plate appearance, and the score box can accumulate:

DG DG EV

along with whatever factual claims occurred during it.

If the interviewer finally abandons the question, then NR can potentially be entered when the box closes. That's different from our previous NR problem: you now have an observable endpoint. The interviewer has moved on. You aren't predicting that the speaker won't eventually return.

For a speech, there isn't an interviewer conveniently supplying the plate appearances. That's where we still have an unresolved design question: what constitutes a row/box/inning equivalent? I agree that we shouldn't force an answer yet. Your remembered experience with an actual scorecard is probably more useful here than imposing an elegant abstraction prematurely.

Contradiction notation

Your arrow modification is better because it makes the direction itself carry information.

I'd formalize only this much:

← / → / ↔︎ = internal contradiction, with scorer free to choose whichever horizontal direction is easiest or most informative.

↑ / ↓ = external contradiction, meaning the conflicting statement exists outside the present speech/interview.

Then put the reference beside it when known:

←17 = conflicts with entry 17 in this event.
↑R23 = conflicts with previously catalogued recurring claim 23.

I particularly like allowing ↔︎, because sometimes neither statement deserves to be treated as the reference proposition. They simply can't both be true.

The severity diamond

And yes, let's simplify the verification notation to ?. Your objection to my ?? is correct within this grammar.

The diamond already supplies the second dimension:

? + one side means check this, relatively minor.

? + four sides means check this, potentially very consequential.

? + completed diamond filled in means this needs serious postgame attention because it's central to what was being argued.

I also think your formulation of the diamond is better than prescribing stroke order. The formal rule should simply be:

Severity is indicated by progressively completing the four sides of a diamond and, at the highest level, filling the completed diamond. Stroke order is irrelevant.

The baseball mnemonic can then be informal: advance around the bases; once you've gone all the way around, fill the park. Or something less cute later.

That is also genuinely consonant with traditional scorekeeping rather than just baseball decoration: baseball scorecards progressively add marks as a runner advances through a play. citeturn0search0

Something important you just reminded me about

Your memory of putting several pieces of information into one batter's box is probably the key to the eventual physical design.

We shouldn't be thinking:

one line = one problem

which really would leave us with decorated notebook paper.

We should probably be thinking:

one box = one rhetorical encounter, containing multiple events.

So an interview question might produce a single box containing something conceptually like:

? F DG DG ←12 R7/3

with the severity diamond sitting in a consistent corner and perhaps the short claim notation occupying the center.

That's much closer to what a baseball scorecard actually accomplishes. 6-4-3, for instance, isn't three separate rows—it compactly reconstructs a sequence of events within one play. And MLB describes scorekeeping precisely in terms of accumulating information inside the batter's box as the play develops. citeturn0search0

There's another nice baseball precedent for what we're inventing: scorers already add personal supplementary marks when standard notation doesn't preserve something they care about. MLB described one scorer adding a dot to record a defensive shift and another adding an arrow to indicate positioning—the official result remained intact while the scorer preserved extra information useful later. citeturn0search5

So I think we've now got three levels that shouldn't be conflated:

Notation — DG, ?, R, arrows, factual classifications, etc.

Box grammar — how several notations coexist to reconstruct one rhetorical encounter.

Sheet structure — how those boxes are organized differently for an interview versus a speech.

That's probably where I'd stop designing for the moment. The interview box has essentially revealed itself, while the speech equivalent still needs that remembered-scorecard problem worked through. And there's no reason to make the speech fit the interview just because we happened to figure the interview out first.