9 How Do I Take Notes?
Norma grew sleepier as the lecture wore on. The late-afternoon sunlight poured through the wall of windows to one side of the grand lecture hall, giving the lecture a timeless and dream-like quality. Norma, not wanting to miss even the smallest detail, forced herself to continue taking notes. Her eyelids, though, repeatedly fell shut, only for her to snap them open again in alarm, to resume taking her increasingly disjointed notes. When the lecture abruptly, if mercifully, ended, Norma snapped her head up. Looking down at her notes, Norma could see that her pen had sometime earlier trailed off into a long, squiggly, and entirely unintelligible line. Norma shook her head in disgust, wondering what she had missed.
Notes
Taking notes during a lecture, video presentation, discussion, or other presentation is a common and traditional student activity. Instructors also frequently exhort students to take notes, sometimes even requiring students to turn in notes for evaluation, scoring, and grading. Both the urge to take notes and the exhortation or requirement to do so are understandable. Lectures and other presentations can introduce a substantial quantity of new information for a student to comprehend, organize, retain, and recall. If the presentation is not recorded for repeated access, and other resources such as a text or class outline do not reliably capture the presentation’s content, a student may sense a strong need to take good notes. Proving the perceived value of notes, note-taking services are a common accommodation for students with special needs due to disabilities, who cannot take notes for themselves. Knowing how and when to take good notes can improve your learning.
Purpose
Just as in the case of reading, you should know your purpose for taking notes before you simply adopt the habit. For some instruction, note taking is entirely unnecessary. The instructor may already have provided a detailed and fully accurate outline of the lecture, slide show, or other presentation tempting you to take your own notes. You might still want to take notes, but you might then best do so for purposes other than capturing essential information, the instructor already having done so for you. For some instructional activities, taking notes is not only unnecessary but also distracting. Your instructor may have designed a discussion forum, for instance, to engage your mind and call upon your voice, rather than to present new information to record and rehearse. If, on the other hand, you are listening to a lecture while following a slide show, you may need to take notes if neither the lecture nor the slide show remain available to you afterward. Your purpose might then indeed be to capture and highlight priority information only directly available to you once. Just know your purpose. But if, instead, your instructor intends a Socratic examination of students, you’d better follow along closely, or you might get caught flat-footed while laboring over your distracting notes.
Use
Students also make different uses of notes, when the anticipated use should affect the form and content of the note taking. A common use is to study from the notes for upcoming quizzes, tests, and examinations. Another common use is to draw from the notes to answer questions, solve problems, or do other academic work required by assignments. In both of those cases, your notes should generally be comprehensive and accurate, especially if you lack substantial other resources, like a textbook, instructor outline, instructor slide show, or other summary from which to study. Instructors do design courses for students to take notes from lectures and then study for examination from those notes. Find out from your instructor, too, if you may use your notes on the exam. If that’s the structure of your course, then pour yourself into taking notes. Yet students use notes for other purposes, too. Your instructor may not give an exam but may instead require a paper or project for final assessment. In that case, you would generally gear your notes toward supporting your paper or project. You might, for instance, capture the lecture’s citations to other resources or insights you suspect you may use for your paper or project, rather than attempt a comprehensive recording.
Form
The form in which you take notes can also matter. If you take notes by computer quicker than by hand, you might think of using a laptop or tablet computer if your instructor permits it. But keyboard entry and computer screens can be distracting from listening, watching, and following the lecture. You may spend more time crafting the words on your screen than processing the lecture. Taking notes by hand can also free you to diagram, insert, annotate, illustrate, use different print sizes, and generally craft a more original and informative record. When taking notes by hand, you are also not looking up and over a computer screen. Generally, prefer handwritten notes over computer notes. You can always type up a cleaner record later if you feel the need to do so.
Length
Do not attempt to make your notes a transcription of what the lecturer or other presentation shares. Transcribing takes too much time, attention, and effort for you to simultaneously process what you’re hearing or observing. You’ll be so busy recording that you won’t be able to comprehend, rehearse, paraphrase, prioritize, elaborate, and evaluate the presentation, when those mental gymnastics are what help you retain, organize, and recall what you learn. Transcription also fails to prioritize, organize, and highlight what you’ll want to recall later. You’ll have to read your notes like reading a transcript of a lecture, having no particular emphasis or organization other than what you can reconstruct from the whole thing. You’ve made no particular gains by transcribing. Instead, for a half-hour or one-hour lecture, try to keep your notes to a single page or two pages. Condense, abbreviate, winnow, organize, diagram, and illustrate. Use note taking as an opportunity to process in much the way you would if you were reading and trying to grasp, summarize, and recall the reading. Make your notes into a schema or mental framework that is easier to visualize and retain than anything like a transcript.
Methods
How you organize your notes can make a difference to the effective use of them. One method has you draw a vertical line about three quarters of the way down the page, toward the left side of the page, and a horizontal line at the bottom where the vertical line ends. Then, record your notes in the largest section to the upper right. Record cues, mnemonics, and questions in the narrower section to the upper left. And summarize the notes in the horizontal section at the bottom. This visual organization can speed your review of the notes for later test taking. Another method is to use hierarchical headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings, in the typical format of an outline. This method can be convenient for compiling notes across lectures into a single course outline. Other methods have you chart complex topics in columns or organize multiple related concepts in flow charts or concept maps. These methods can be useful for retaining mental models of complex related concepts. Choose the method most suited to your purpose for the notes and the use you expect to make of them.
Value
You should now see from the above discussion that taking notes can aid your learning in several ways. First, taking notes involves active engagement with the presentation, when lectures and other presentations tend to permit or encourage passivity. Taking thorough, creative, well-organized notes forces you to be active in a forum in which any other form of activity would be difficult or impossible. Second, taking proper notes, not just transcribing, forces you to mentally comprehend, prioritize, recall, paraphrase, and physically record, which are all acts of processing that aid memory. Taking proper notes simultaneously enhances understanding while encouraging elaboration and even anchoring and evaluation, again aiding memory. Taking proper notes also creates a study and review resource, aiding completion of further assignments and performance on related exams. Taking proper notes at a lecture that you must attend can also be a significant time saver, considering that lectures or other presentations tend to distill readings. Consider note taking to be a primary learning tool, depending on your program and its goals.
Outlines
Notes differ from outlines, both in their purpose and use. You take notes during a lecture or other presentation to capture and preserve what you hear and observe. You prepare an outline after lectures or other presentations to compile and organize what you have heard, observed, and learned, typically for review for examination purposes. Notes are preliminary. Notes are data to use for further study. Outlines are summative and final. Outlines reflect what you learned and what you need to retain. If you take notes in an outline style, you may be able to simply staple together, copy and paste electronically, or otherwise compile your notes into an outline, without their further manipulation. But you may prefer in the course of compiling your outline to supplement, correct, and improve it from further studies, review, and resources. What you record in your notes in class or while watching or listening to recorded presentations may be incomplete, disorganized, or even inaccurate in some respects. Compiling an outline from notes and other resources enables you to improve your understanding and organization. As indicated briefly above, outlines are typically in hierarchical form with headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings. An outline of a dozen or so pages would ordinarily be sufficient for a three-credit course. Condense anything longer so that you can review the entire outline within about an hour before your exam.
Shared
Students often have the opportunity to share notes and outlines or even to acquire notes and outlines from student outline banks or commercial services. Avoid doing so whenever possible. Only resort to borrowed or purchased notes or outlines when you were unable to attend the lecture or other presentation, or when something interrupted or distracted your note taking in a way that causes you to question their reliability. And only do so when the instructor and program permit it. Acquiring notes and outlines from others eliminates the positive effects of creating your own notes and outlines. Acquiring notes and outlines from others also introduces the possibility, indeed the probability, of errors that others introduce. Notes or outlines created from presentations other than the ones your instructor gave can also leave gaps and introduce inconsistencies with what your instructor presented. Don’t rely on others. That’s not the point of instruction. Instead, do it yourself.
Intelligence
Artificial intelligence offers students the option of allowing a device and application to capture and summarize a lecture or other presentation, as a substitute or supplement for the student taking notes. Instructors and programs may either allow or prohibit that use of artificial intelligence, or may not expressly say one way or the other. Follow whatever rule your instructor and program impose. If their rules conflict, obtain a clarification in writing. If neither your program nor instructor express a rule, confirm with your instructor before using artificial intelligence for note taking. Do not make assumptions or follow the crowd. Your school or department may have a hidden rule, custom, or convention prohibiting unauthorized use of devices and applications. Don’t risk misconduct charges. Get permission. And while AI note-taking programs can free you to listen, think, and rehearse, don’t rely on AI note taking as a way of giving less attention and concentration to presentations. Your ease is not the point. Ease doesn’t generally lead to increased learning. Effort and active engagement promote learning.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how skilled of a note taker are you? Having read the above chapter, what would improve your note-taking skill? Are you consistently aware of your purpose for taking notes? Do you routinely take notes when appropriate and forgo notes when appropriate, or do you instead find yourself forgetting to take notes when you should or wasting time and attention taking notes when you shouldn’t? Do you use your notes effectively? Are your notes generally in a useful form? Are your notes generally of an appropriate length? What is your preferred note-taking method, whether in outline form, chart or table form, diagram form, concept map, or other method? Do you use different note-taking methods for different subjects? How valuable do you feel taking notes is to you in your studies and learning? Do you also create outlines from your notes? Do your outlines draw on other sources beyond your notes? Have you attempted to rely on notes or outlines you acquired from others? If so, what was your experience?
Key Points
Taking notes, when done properly, can be a highly useful learning tool.
Know your purpose for taking notes and how you will use the notes.
Prefer handwritten notes over a computer keyboard and screen.
Don’t transcribe for notes but instead select, condense, and prioritize.
Choose among outline, concept map, chart, or diagram notes form.
Value note taking for the processing it requires and memory it aids.
Compile full-course outlines from notes and other reliable sources.
Avoid acquiring notes and outlines from other sources.
Use AI note taking only if permitted and as supplement not substitute.