Speeches, News Conferences and Meetings

Okay, I guess I'll just start right away with my questions:

1. How can I get information about the person who's going to speak/has just spoken? Obviously, I'm not thinking of a famous person but more like Average Joe who happens to be a board member of a committee in some small town. So many times, the person is not famous enough that I could find info on him/her on the Internet. But at the same time, I just can't go up to him/her after the meeting because, you know, you just can't go up to someone asking "How do you spell your name?" or "What's your middle initial?" Or maybe the problem is with me? I mean I'm kind of shy. I just don't like asking questions that I think are derogatory for me to ask. What should I do? (Wow, this sounded like a Q&A posting in some teenage magazine.)

2. Is there some kind of list of abbreviations? Every time I'm about to cover a speech, I make up abbreviations, but I usually forget them after 10 mins. And also, I abbreviate words that look obvious then, but later on... man, I have no idea what those 3 letters stand for. So I would love to have some kind of list I could learn, and then use it consequently.

3. There's the "Describing the Participants" part when the book writes about how important facial impressions, etc. are. How can I put those in my story? I guess I can't write, "...he said with sarcasm."

And yeah, one more thing. On pg. 256 the book describes how I should number the participants and draw a sketch of where members are sitting. I did that when I was reporting on the city council meeting. What happened was that I kept turning pages to go back and see what the number of speaker was. Also, a meeting is not about reciting monologues. So, by the time I put down what number 1 was speaking about, I realize that uppsss, the last 2 sentences came actually from number ugghhh, I don't know, I have to turn pages to go back to my little sketch...

So, the ultimate conclusion is: I don't like speeches and public meetings!