How to take fewer, but better notes: 5 tips your teachers won’t tell you
Scrambled your fingers during class but still forgot everything afterwards? You’ve been learning wrong your entire life.
High school and college students, I bet this scenario sounds painfully familiar:
Your teacher or professor is standing at the board writing equations that seem to make natural sense to them. You, on the other hand, struggle to keep up with their train of thought and instead, you transcribe everything from the board into your notebook.
An hour later, with an exhausted brain and aching fingers, you think, I’ll make sense of all that after class.
After class, you review your notes. With only two days until the test, you don’t seem to understand anything, so you memorize it all. Of course, the second the test is over, your mind hits delete. You forget everything. And the cycle repeats.
If that sounds like you, you’re not alone.
A lot of students don’t realize that their note-taking strategy is hurting their learning, and their grades reflect this as a result. A while back, I wrote a short article on why excessive note-taking can be devastating for the deeper understanding of concepts.
Why? Because long-term learning is all about making connections. When you bridge two concepts, you deepen your understanding for both of them, and store them in your subconscious memory to be adeptly applied later.
Well, that’s all easier said than done.
So how, practically, do you make room for connections to form in your head? As someone who started with B’s and C’s in 6th grade and ended with a current 4.0 GPA in high school junior year, I had gone on a winding journey to figure out the secrets to thriving academically.
To save future students some stress, I’ve compiled 5 tips that your teachers probably didn’t tell you, that I wish someone had told me as a freshman.
Before I begin, I just want to say that as a STEM student, this list might naturally lean more science and math heavy, but the same concepts should apply to any subject, really.
1. Outline the topics before class.
Go over any assigned readings from the night before, and create a rough outline of what you learned before each class. It also helps to recall any former knowledge you have on a certain topic.
Before entering any lecture, I keep in mind two main questions:
“What do I know?” and “What do I need to know?”
Mentally filing what you already know helps you absorb new information and put them in context. Every new piece of information you obtain in class is no longer an isolated bullet point, but a page that belongs in a book. If you already have in mind the Table of Contents, it’s much easier to find a place to insert that new page. The same principle applies to knowledge — it’s much easier to fill in the blanks rather than start with a blank slate.
2. Write fewer words. Draw more diagrams.
The saying goes,
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
From my personal experience, even a million words sometimes fail to capture the essence of a graph, flowchart, or mindmap. I truly believe that diagrams operate on a different dimension. Formatting your notes in more visually stimulating ways helps you interpret information more fluidly, and gets you out of a mindset of linear thinking.
Another simple but effective change we can all make is to use cards instead of a notebook. Using smaller notecards psychologically tricks you to write less, and breaks free from the “bullet point” mentality — that information appears in a ordered and defined list.
3. Paraphrase.
I’ve been there. When you don’t fully understand a concept, you copy down everything your teachers say verbatim. We do that in an attempt to obtain a sense of control over our knowledge.
Every wasted learning opportunity stems from the idea of “I’ll memorize it now, and make sense of it later.” But more often than not, “later” never comes.
When you think you’re recording everything, you’re actually missing more information than if you put down the pen and listen — only writing down facts to refer back to. I try to limit my notes to only around 20% of the lecture. Even for that 20%, I almost always paraphrase.
When you’re tempted to think, this is going way over my head, try combining two points into one or play around with the wording. Even the simple act of grammatically rearranging a sentence forces you to think through the ideas and remember them better. For math equations, try rearranging it and see what patterns might emerge.
4. Write down only the equations and facts. Not the main ideas.
This point might go against your intuition, but hear me out.
I used to write down every main idea my teachers emphasize in speech, thinking I’m cleverly distilling important information. When I first started learning calculus, my notebook said, “taking the integral reverses the derivative.”
Thus, the idea of the two functions essentially “reversing” each other was so ingrained in my head that I made the notorious mistake of integrating f=0 (with bounds) to get 3, because the derivative of 3 is zero, apparently.
I know, it was absurd… But forgive my fifteen-year-old logic.
My point is, if I had written down the equation and drew a few diagrams instead of what I thought was the “main idea” of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, I would have avoided digging myself into a misconception.
Ideas can change. Your understanding of them can also change. However, facts don’t.
Embrace the fluidity of ideas and use it to your advantage. As you learn more, don’t be afraid to debunk your previous, oversimplified understanding just because your teacher wrote it on the board, probably to simplify it for you to understand at that moment.
5. Don’t just review your notes. Revise them.
The biggest mistake I made before a test is re-reading my notes over and over — in an attempt to know facts just enough to regurgitate them on a test. Once I started the simple exercise of revising my notes, however, I got better grades while sparing myself hours of cramming.
After every class, I take 5 minutes to read over what I wrote down. The key is, instead of tucking the page away until days before a test, I set aside another 10–15 minutes. I cross out some points and write extra ones, editing my notes like an essay.
See this revision as an example.
Class notes
Revised notes
I promise this extra step will be worth it. By revising your notes, perhaps in a separate document, you are not only streamlining them for future reference, but also forcing your brain to process the information actively.
You might decide to cut down redundancies in some places, and in other places, fill in gaps with additional facts taken from your textbook or online. Rearranging vocab words by context also help you make connections you didn’t see when you first learned a concept.
All in all…
The key is to give every new piece of information a sense of relevance in your brain. That way, your brain will subconsciously prioritize the information.
Basically you want to make your brain think: Oh, so this is why we need to know x, y, and z! Let’s remember it!
I hope I was able to give you some tangible tips on how to “make connections” as you learn. When I gradually implemented these changes over my high school career, I saw my grades and motivation improve drastically.
I’m proud to have ended my junior year with a 4.0 GPA, but even more importantly, an insatiable desire to learn. I’m excited to see what new knowledge awaits me next year, and in my life ahead.
If you enjoyed the article, let me know in the comments what you do to learn better. I only mentioned 5 points, but there are many more that I didn’t have a chance to say!
