Note Taking

Taking good notes from reading and lectures can enhance your academic learning significantly.

An important part of taking good notes is preparation, so

• before a lecture familiarise yourself with the topic. The module handbook should give you an indication of the main topics.
• skim the outline of a text before reading in more detail 
 

The Open University explains why adding notes, underlining or highlighting important aspects of your reading are important.

Most people develop their own style of note-taking, but if you feel that you could improve yours, try different note-taking techniques to decide which one suits you best, or which ones you could combine for your own style. The Academic Skills Centre at California Polytechnic presents different note-taking techniques.

Whichever technique you choose, try to follow the principles of good note-taking:

Don't just repeat

Try to process what your have just read and heard before taking notes. This makes sure that you are not just repeating it, but have understood it. This means that you should:

• use your own words
• use headings differentiate between main topics and detail
• number points in lists to keep track of the structure
• leave some space to add comments after the lecture / a first reading of a passage

Be transparent

Make sure that you can trace the origin of information in your notes, as this will make using them for academic writing much easier. This means you should:

• clearly differentiate between evidence from other sources and your own thoughts (use different colours, divide the page into one column for evidence, one for your thought)
• write down full bibliographic details of ALL sources as soon as you start taking notes
• add the author's name next to every note on their work

Make sure notes are easy to use

Note-taking might help you think while you are reading or listening to a lecture, but unless notes can be used later on, they are of limited use, so:

• keep them brief so you will not be demotivated by endless pages of scribble. Use short phrases rather than sentences, abbreviations
• outline the structure of a text / lecture clearly, so you can find what you are looking for quickly. Add subheadings, use colours...
• organise your notes in a ringbinder for each subject, save them in the right folder and label each file correctly if you take electronic notes

If you find you become overwhelmed by the amount of detail in a text, try to write down the questions you have before reading it (one question per page). Then add notes on the correct page. Alternatively you could use our forms for note on

text books Note Taking from Textbooks 

research articles Note Taking from Research 

texts on theory Note Taking from Texts on Theories