Note taking

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• What Is the point of note taking?
• What kind of notes should you take?
• Reading for note taking
• Note taking tips

What Is the point of note taking?

• Focusing attention. Note taking stops your mind from wandering as you read.
• 'Making' sense. You are pressed into finding and formulating the ideas in a way that makes sense to you.
• A form of external memory. The notes act as a kind of extension to the memory capacity of your mind.
• A symbol of progress. They may provide evidence of work and a boost to morale.
• Preparation for an assignment/essay. This is an essential part of assignment/essay construction
• Pulling the course together. They help create order, making ideas less confused and more useable.

What kind of notes should you take?

This depends on:

• The way your mind works
• The kind of text it is
• What you want to use the notes for
• The amount of time you think is reasonable to invest.

If you can, you should aim to take notes only on one side of a page. This has the advantage that you can spread out notes on a table and see what you have, without constantly having to turn over and check. If you do not spread out notes, you may be able to use the blank side facing for comments or additions. If you do this, make sure you do not separate the notes or you lose the comments in the appropriate place.

For assignment/essay notes, you need the title of a book, its author, publisher and place and date of publication. In the case of a journal article, you need the title, author, and name and date (including number) of the journal.

Reading For note taking

You need some type of system for reading and finding what information is useful.

Some people find the SQ3R system works well.

Whatever system you adopt to improve your reading and learning skills, it is virtually always useful to glance over the contents of a new chapter, article or book quickly before settling down to read it properly. When approaching a new topic, it is also very desirable to spend a few minutes early on in the piece, perhaps before you start to read, asking yourself a few questions and what you hope might be included and what you might learn.

Notes should not be simply a shorthand copy of the original text They should be an attempt to pick out the 'bones' of the text - or more specifically those points in the text which are relevant to your studies.

Notetaking tips

Ask yourself questions as you read: what is the main idea of this part, do it for each paragraph, section and chapter.

Highlighting

Highlighting a book is okay as long as you own it - a textbook is not a work of art that must not be desecrated. Highlighting makes learning quicker and easier, as you can reread the highlighted parts through over and over to learn them. It is usually a total waste of time to note your text book, unless you find it is the only way to remember the information. It is quicker to highlight and revise by reading over those passages, skipping the less important and unmarked ones. You should never highlight or write in library books of course.

Some students believe that highlighting is a waste of time, as if it is important enough to highlight, it should really be in your notes. If you highlight you must read and reread the book's highlights to learn the material. If you take notes instead, you must read and reread the notes.

The value of highlighting and underlining;

• focusing your attention on the text
• making you think about what the key concepts and issues are
• leaving a trace on the page of the sense you have been making of the text.

Summarise

Note only the main ideas, nothing else, unless you want an example. You should try to structure your notes so that they make sense and are easy to read later. If you can write clearly, make every effort to do so as you will find that reading and revision later much easier if you are not poring over scribble and trying to work out what you might have meant.

Colour

When making notes, some people find it convenient to underline subheadings in different colours, for example., title in red, main headings in black, sub-heads in blue; others might use block capitals for titles, double underlines for main headings and single underlines for sub-heads. It is easy to go to too much trouble on different colours and wind up with a work of art without getting down to studying the contents properly. You should be careful not to become obsessed by appearances. If you can do it quickly and easily and it helps when you read and reread your notes, then fine, you should go ahead.

Formatting

Some people find using an inset system for major and minor points is better. After the centred main heading, often uppercase (capital letters), the first heading is placed at the margin and the next sub-heading gets stepped in, maybe by a centimetre as the importance decreases. It is back to the margin for the next main heading and so on.

Comments

As you take the notes, leave enough room for your comments and anything else you might want to add later. Read up the notes as soon as possible after taking them, and try to put them into your head as you do this. If you let too long pass before reading them, you are likely to lose the information and have to start again. It should be a habit to read your lecture/module notes the same day you take them, and at least once more the next day. Early reinforcement is excellent, so you should try to make this a habit.

Graphics

It pays to add arrows, circles, boxes, dotted lines, shadings, or whatever makes sense to you, to get a better looking and more pictorial set of notes. Even little pictures or cartoons can help, as long as you do not spend much time on them. Keep in mind that it is not the essential prettiness of the notes that is important to you, only what you learn from revising them constantly. The reason for making your notes more interesting to look at is that when you read and reread your notes, if they are distinctive they will be more easily remembered. If each page looks a bit different, it will be more easily recalled to the mind's eye.

Grouping

Your notes will come from different sources, perhaps including the radio or TV as well as books and journal articles. They are all most usefully kept grouped with like material or topic, rather than by source. In this way when you come to reread or learn, you get all the material you have on that topic. When introduced to a new theory or concept, you might find it useful to go off and look up several different explanations of it in different books, including encyclopedias and specialist dictionaries of that topic.

Review

The most important thing about your notes is that you read and reread them, so that you know the material contained in them. This includes any criticisms of the major viewpoints you may have been given, found for yourself, or thought of. The material has to go into your head. It is a waste of time to make notes and then ignore them. You cannot learn by osmosis. You must read your notes and think carefully about what you are reading.

Note taking is not a single 'skill' which you can acquire once for all times and occasions. It is a range of different activities, the common characteristic being you are writing for yourself rather than an audience. It is more a strategy than a skill. It involves reading texts in an active way: thinking 'What is this about ?', 'What do I want to remember', and writing down the answers. It also requires flexibility, detailed or sketchy as appropriate. You need to keep asking yourself 'Are these notes doing the job I want ?', or 'Could I be using my time more effectively ?', and changing your approach accordingly.