How to Take Better Notes
Prepping your mindset
I used to get embarrassed when I let others borrow my notes. So I would tell this little joke whenever I let someone borrow my notes, “I am a little dumb, so my notes are a bit TOO detailed. I apologize in advance!”
Don’t get me wrong, I am an A-B student, and I have only ever gotten two F’s in my whole life. I don’t truly believe I lack intelligence. I do have a weakness — I have a poor memory. I also have a strength — the ability to analyze, synthesize, and repurpose information. I love to think deeply about large concepts, strip it down, and turn it into something easier to understand.
My weakness in my memory, combined with my strength for repurposing information makes me a mean note-taking machine. In a series of articles I am going to teach you how to take more effective notes. This article will have a more academic focus, though these skills could be transferable to other areas in life, such as meeting at work.
- What is the purpose behind your notes?
- How is your class (or meeting) structured?
- What is expected of you from this class (or meeting)?
Consider this article the background of general ideas needed to become a good note taker, with the future articles being of a more technical nature. Let’s get started, shall we?
The Purpose Of Your Notes
When taking notes it is helpful to have a purpose in mind. This purpose will help you decide what kind of notes to take. There can be several reasons for taking notes:
- Memorization
- Inspiration
- Jump off points
- To use as a technical guide
- To bring information back to a team, or for your own personal use away from the source
You should also take stock of what your learning style is, and how good your information recall is.
Let’s say that you are taking a chemistry course which will require you to memorize a lot of chemical compounds. If you are a visual learner, it may be helpful to draw diagrams of the compounds so you have a visual recall of them. Perhaps lists and note cards would be more up your alley. If you are taking a music course, or are in a virtual meeting, it may be more effective to take audio-recordings of your session and save them in a file to look back on.
Do you have a horrible memory like I do? Then you should take more notes, and find ways to organize them in a way that makes sense to you (I will write another article in the future regarding my methods of organization).
Organizing lengthy notes is important so you don’t get lost in the sea of information. Drawing pictures, highlighting certain sections, adding tabs and page numbers, and adding an index to your notes will help keep lengthy notes organized.
Do you have an excellent memory? Then perhaps your notes can be more like jump off statements. Often when I am in a business meeting, I will just write short comments to reflect on. Since I often write these in order, I have a general idea of the flow of the conversation, and from the short phrase I can recall the gist of the conversation in that section. You can think of these shorter notes like shelves in your mind, on which you place various items. The note is the shelf, but the additional information linked to these notes are like the books on the shelf.
To recap, knowing the purpose of your notes will help with:
- Understanding what kind of notes you should take
- Structuring your notes
- Knowing whether your notes should be visual, verbal, or written
- Knowing how in-depth to make your notes
The Structure Of Your Class/Meeting
Let us start with the structure of a college course. Most college courses utilize a digital “turn-it-in” system such as Canvas, Schoology, Edsby, or Moodle. The one I am most familiar with is Canvas, but many of these apps include similar concepts. These programs are used a little differently depending on whether you are doing an on-campus course, or an online course.
If your campus does use a system like this I recommend getting as familiar with it as possible. Log in on your first day, click on random icons, watch YouTube videos about the app, and read the information section. This will help you understand how you will be able to use the app to fit your personal learning style. Since I am most familiar with Canvas, the rest of this section will focus on Canvas’s capabilities.
For both on-campus courses and online courses, in Canvas, you will be able to see all of your future assignments and tests. In the grading section, there is a breakdown of how much each type of assignment or test will affect your grade. There is a calendar listing when each assignment is due. Also included will be modules. Each professor structures these modules differently, and they have a different function depending on the professor, and on whether the course is on-campus or online. The course syllabus will be located under each course within campus, giving you even more information regarding the structure of your course, the grading system, the professor’s personal policies, as well as pertinent information regarding course resources.
Your professor is another important resource. If you can, set up time with your professor to discuss the set-up of the course, how they would recommend navigating the resources in the modules, and what exactly it is they will be looking for in future assignments. Not only will this make you stand out among your peers as someone who genuinely cares about your education, but it will also provide you with a greater understanding of how to meet their grading requirements.
I will give you a few examples. Recently, I took Intro. to Literature (on-line), Oceanography (online), Life-span Development (online), and Mathematics for Liberal Arts (on-campus) in the same term.
Life-Span Development:
To my dismay, I realized, after analyzing the calendar, that I had mistakenly taken Life-Span development as a mini-course — crushing multiple months of work into just one month. I thought about dropping the course, or seeing if there was an open seat in a full-term course. Sadly, there were none available. I decided that for the first month, I would focus the bulk of my time on Life-Span development. Luckily for me, there were very few assignments in this course. Most of the work involved quizzes and major tests, with only two papers, and one discussion post. My notes consisted of mostly demographic information, and how these demographics impacted each stage of life. I also had the foresight to look at the description of the final, in which it said the final would consist of 70% of the questions taken from the quizzes and tests, and 30% new questions. I made sections of my notes dedicated to the questions and answers from the quizzes, so that they could be used as a cram-study-guide before the final.
Intro. to Literature:
At first, I wrote off Intro. to Literature as my simplest class. Most of the assignments were papers, discussions, and info-graphics, and easy task for a lit-nut like myself. However, after my first paper only got a 78% I was forced to re-evaluate the course. I went through, and I read each and every comment the professor left. He left a lot of general statements like, “weak thesis statement,” “information too general,” “used to many sources, negating authority.” These statements were helpful in a sense that I knew what I had to work on, but he hadn’t provided any resources to look to to help improve these issues in my work. So, I took it upon myself to ask him about my concerns directly. I found out that although the information surrounding this course was very simple, the professor wasn’t looking for generalities, he was looking for the student to take deep dives themselves, and take a stance by which they should defend. I found I had a weakness, I was a stubborn fence-sitter. I would argue for both sides of the argument, and leave ambiguous answers as to who I felt was more right. I always fell somewhere in the center. This made it so my papers were equally as ambiguous. He complimented the actual writing and structure, but made it clear that if I was going to improve I was going to have to make my stance perfectly clear, which would require taking one. I had to completely change the way I was taking notes. I skipped through the teaching resources, and instead focused my notes on the resources I would be using for my papers. I took more time reviewing my sources and vetting them. I also spent a lot of time thinking about what angle I should take, and how to efficiently get to the point. The course was less about the information, and more so about improving the technical skills surrounding paper writing. My next four papers were A’s!
Oceanography:
Oceanography involved a lot of interesting assignment types. The bulk of the work was reading and note-taking, so it ended up taking a lot of my time. I was really happy when I finished life-span development and could dedicate more of my time to this course. The information consisted of a lot of descriptions of phenomena, and I found it much easier to illustrate the concepts, and included fewer written notes than I had originally anticipated. There was only one written assignment: analyze one of the three documentaries, and answer these 10 questions in an essay style discussion post, all while backing up your opinions with evidence from the book. Since there were not many writing assignments, I didn’t need to include many citations in my notes. Other assignments included discussion posts where we analyzed depth charts and projects ocean level rising charts, assessed the surrounding conditions, and explained how and why these different areas will experience water-level changes. This course was honestly the most fun and visual course I took. I am not a great artist, but copying the diagrams and creating my own made my notes not only more effective, but also more fun to review.
Mathematics for Liberal Arts:
Mathematics for Liberal Arts was surprisingly my simplest subject. Normally I struggle with mathematics of any kind. However, this professor made the content super easy to follow. He would make jokes surrounding the content matter, and wouldn’t show even the slightest irritation when asked to repeat concepts. Each class was incredibly fast paced. I didn’t have time to take the intricate notes I would normally take, and so I had a heart to heart with the professor regarding my learning style and how although I understood the concepts well, and he made them VERY simple, when looking back on my notes I would be a bit confused when trying to do the homework because there would be gaps in the content. He suggested this: “Next class, unless I tell you to write something, don’t take a single note. Record audio from our next class as your notes. When doing the homework look back on the recordings. Let me explain it for you twenty-times, in the past, if necessary.” This improved my life in the class exponentially. I more focused on the professor during class, making it so I didn’t miss a single bit of information both in person, or in my notes.
As you can see it is important to have a good relationship with your professors, and to have a good grasp on the structure on your class. I highly recommend that when you start your new course you take a deep dive in your course syllabi, the structure of your course modules, and the calendar. These will give you a detailed idea of the structure of your course.
Knowing the structure of your course will help you with:
* Determining how much time you will spend on assignments/tests/note-taking
* Knowing which courses are going to require more of your attention
* Knowing what kind of notes will be helpful in each course
What Are You To Take From This Class/Meeting?
Now that you know the purpose of your notes and how the structure of your surroundings can affect your notes, the next question to as yourself is, “why am I learning this information”?
I personally view all of the notebooks I created over the last four years to be mini-text books. I painstakingly vetted the information that I put into my notes, and made sure the condensed version communicated the original information as clearly as possible. In these notebooks, I included online sources, direct sources from text-books, illustrations, and in-depth descriptions of the topics from class. I wanted to be able to look back on my notes and use them as an accurate source of information and as jump-off points for future inspiration.
Example:
I have an interest in one day writing science fiction that is as close to real science as possible. As you can imagine, I took extremely detailed notes in my science courses (which were Astronomy and Oceanography). I know from the notes I took where I can look to get more accurate information in the future. I can also use a lot of the information as inspiring jump off points. We learned in class that you could use your thumb as a general tool to estimate distance and parallax.
To measure parallax of a star’s supposed located and true location, close your right eye and place your thumb directly over the star. Now open your right eye and close your left eye. Measure how far your thumb shifted from the star. knowing the distance of your pupils from each other and the distance your thumb appeared to move from its apparent position you can estimate the parallax of the star using trigonometry!
Let's suppose I am trying to write about how an ancient society mapped the stars, this tid-bit of information would help me bring life to the story.
I implore you, even if you are taking a class that isn’t that interesting to you, to try to find the inspiration hiding in the course material. It is difficult to pour all of your focus into something you find boring or uninteresting. Don’t just take your notes with the intention of taking a test or writing a paper, and then forgetting the content. The more specific you get with your degree, the more you will need the background information and technical skills gained from your previous courses.
This stands in the case of a business meeting as well. When you’re at your meeting, don’t just attend as a matter of compliance, be an active listener and/or participating party in the conversation. The company decided to set aside time for you to learn something new, tell you something exciting, or to get a pulse check on how things are going on your end. What do you want to take back to the team from this meeting? Are there congratulations in order? Is there a new process that needs to be put into practice ASAP? Don’t let that meeting be a waste of your time. Take something home from it.
Conclusion
Now you are outfitted with the mindset to base your notes on. Look forward to future articles explaining how to use illustrations to augment your notes and how organization is an integral part of note keeping.
Until we meet again!
