A dot book is a small notebook

Notebook

A notebook is a book or binder composed of pages of notes, often ruled, made out of paper, used for purposes including recording notes or memoranda, writing, drawing, and scrapbooking....

 utilized by marching band

Marching band

Marching band is a physical activity in which a group of instrumental musicians generally perform outdoors and incorporate some type of marching with their musical performance. Instrumentation typically includes brass, woodwinds, and percussion instruments...

s (especially high school show bands and drum corps

Drum and bugle corps (modern)

A drum and bugle corps, also known as a drum corps, is a musical marching unit consisting of brass instruments, percussion instruments, and color guard. Typically operating as independent non-profit organizations, drum corps perform in competitions, parades, festivals, and other civic functions...

) in order to aid the learning of formations on a field. The dot book was invented by Leslie Allard, a prominent high school band instructor and all-star percussionist. The name is derived from the use of dots on drill sheets which symbolize players on the field: a dot book focuses on the owner's particular dots and other marchers the player may have to guide

Guide

A guide is a person who leads anyone through unknown or unmapped country. This includes a guide of the real world , as well as a person who leads someone to more abstract places .-Guide - meanings related to travel and recreational pursuits:There are many variants of...

 (use to determine an adjusted location).

The general layout of a dot book contains the "longitude

Longitude

Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position of a point on the Earth's surface. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees, minutes and seconds, and denoted by the Greek letter lambda ....

s" and "latitude

Latitude

In geography, the latitude of a location on the Earth is the angular distance of that location south or north of the Equator. The latitude is an angle, and is usually measured in degrees . The equator has a latitude of 0°, the North pole has a latitude of 90° north , and the South pole has a...

s" of an American football field. However, a cartesian coordinate system

Cartesian coordinate system

A Cartesian coordinate system specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances from the point to two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length...

 (x/y) is rarely used, rather an alternative system of plotting

Chart

A chart is a graphical representation of data, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart"...

 players as dots on a grid and some jargon

Jargon

Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...

 is used. For instance, a player may write: "3 inside 45R and 5 in front BH." This would mean that the player is 3 steps inside (towards the 50 yard line) from the 45th yard line from the right side (facing the press box) and is five steps in front of the back hash (see Field and players of American football for an explanation of terms).

Many times, however, a person's own dot book will contain their own specialized shorthand

Shorthand

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...

 to represent their location on the field. Dot books can vary from simple (providing only the location of the marcher) to complex (also providing the location of nearby marchers whom you are guiding). This poses problems when players are switched between positions on the field: switching dot books is often difficult and many times players end up rewriting their dot books.

Dot books are considered essential by many high school band instructors to the progress of drill

Parade (military)

A military parade is a formation of soldiers whose movement is restricted by close-order manouevering known as drilling or marching. The American usage is "formation or military review". The military parade is now mostly ceremonial, though soldiers from time immemorial up until the late 19th...

. Severe penalties can be incurred for forgetting or losing one's dot book. Dot books also become irreplaceable as a season moves on: whenever drill is changed or a visual is added, the dot book becomes the sole record of this change. Loss of a dot book can result in the need for the band to readjust something that had been handled several months prior.

From drill sheet to dot book

This is a sample page of a pack of drill sheets. The owner of this page is AS10, and his dot on the field as been circled accordingly. After looking at this page, AS10 wrote in his page on the dot book at the top of this article. Several notable features:

• Reversal of field - This is because all players face the "box" or "Director Viewpoint" of a field. Therefore, a player facing the correct direction will normally never view the field in this way (which is backwards).
• Smallness of dot book - Drill sheets are unwieldy to handle because of their size. The dot book overcomes this limitation through loss of data: by only focusing on your dot, and the dots that are around it, you can eliminate most of the other dots. In many ways, a dot book is simply a magnification of a small area of a drill sheet.
• Division of five yards into eight steps: this is called an eight to five step.

Coordinate Sheets

An alternative to the dot book is the coordinate sheet. Like dot books, coordinate sheets are small and meant to be worn around the neck on a lanyard. Coordinate sheets are set up as a list of the member's places on the field, given in coordinates (such as 5 steps inside the right 45 yard line and 2.25 steps in front of the Home hash), each "set" numbered. Also on the sheet is the amount of steps it takes to go from one set to another, but this isn't written plainly. Set 1 always has a "0" by it. If it should take sixteen counts to move to the next set, a "16" will be placed next to Set 2's coordinates. If it should take eight counts to move to the third set, a "24" is next to Set 3's coordinates.

External links

• My Dot Book - Order custom, fill-in-the-blank dot books for your band or drum corps
• Google search - Information on dot books on the web is generally sparse because it is an internal feature of most marching band programs.