Notes taken during lectures, seminars and research will form the basis of your work, helping you to prepare essays and dissertations and revise for exams. Effective note-taking is a very useful skill which can help you to:
- focus and concentrate
- organise and record key details
- gain a fuller understanding of the information and improve your recall
- save time and energy by working more efficiently.
Tips for effective note-taking
- be critical about the material - assess its importance to the subject matter, and its credibility
- don't copy large amounts of text verbatim
- always keep detailed notes of any resources used so that you can reference properly later
- review and summarise your notes afterwards
- organise and store your notes so that they are easy to retrieve.
Note-taking techniques
The following are examples of note-taking techniques:
- mind maps (e.g. spider diagram) - help you to visualise key points and the connections and overlaps between them
- tabular notes - help with making comparisons between points
- flow charts - help to visualise steps in a process
- index cards
- highlighting and annotating.
Note-taking from lectures
To get the most out of your lectures, you may find it useful to:
- find out the subject of the lecture beforehand and read up, so that you'll be prepared for the key themes and ideas
- don't try to write down everything - keep to main points
- create a wide margin on each page so that there's room to expand on your notes later.
Note-taking from written material
When note-taking from written material - whether from a printed source, or online - it is helpful to:
- take reference details down before you start reading
- if you write down a direct quote, make sure you specify this in your notes to avoid later confusion
- reading the introduction and conclusion is useful for ascertaining the main arguments and context
- read critically.