Back to School Basics: Good Notetaking

Let me set a scene for you: you have a huge test coming up and you need to study for it. You’ve gathered up your favourite study snacks, made yourself a pot of coffee, sharpened all of your pencils, and textbooks and notebooks litter every inch of your desk. You’ve been taking notes all semester so you should have an easy time studying, right? However, when you open your notebooks, you find that none of the notes make sense. All you have to help you is sentences with no context and arrows pointing to words that don’t fit anywhere.

Unorganized notes or notes that just don’t make sense are the worst nightmare of any student. If you often find yourself with this problem, or want to avoid it as much as possible, give these tricks a try!

Use Headings

One of the easiest ways to keep your notes organized is to use headings. Headings and subheadings can help show where one topic starts and another stops, which makes specific topics easier to find for studying. Be sure to stay consistent with the way you use you headings, though. If you start adding too many or change the way you use them between note taking sessions, your notes can quickly turn from an organized masterpiece to a disorganized mess.

Add Some Color

Highlighters and colored pens are your best friends while taking notes. Adding color to your notes will make it easy to find important sentences, words, or headings. Figure out a method that makes sense to you and stick with it throughout your notes. Maybe you like to use a yellow highlighter for your headings and a pink highlighter for key words, or maybe you switch colored pens between your headings, subheadings and text. Whatever method you choose to use, keep it consistent and your notes will not only be well organized but pretty too!

Take Advantage of Your Instructors

The notes that they post, that is! A lot of instructors, especially professors in college or university, post notes in the form of a PowerPoint or a study guide document. Use this to your advantage! If you’re the type of person that likes digital notes, you can type directly onto the document or into the notes of the PowerPoint slides. If you like having a hard copy, print the notes out and write on top of them. PowerPoint even has an option to print out three slides to a page, with lines beside it for note taking. This way, if you miss something a professors says, no worries! It will all be right in front of you.

Only Write What You Need

When I first started college, I would copy down a whole set of notes or an entire textbook chapter, because I was dead set on the idea that writing out everything that I was required to read would help me remember it all. Needless to say, all I got out of that was notebooks filled with too many words that I could never remember. Instead of learning the hard way like I did, try just writing down key words or phrases. By doing this, you’re more likely to remember what you need to remember, not overwhelm your brain, and save space in your notebooks all at the same time.

Have a System

There are a lot of structured note taking systems that you can adopt, such as The Cornell System or Mind Mapping. If these systems work for you, great! If you find them to be confusing or just not something you like, find your own system! Whatever you choose to do, stick with it through all of your notes. If you take notes the same way every time, your brain will become accustomed to the system and you will have an easier time picking out what you need to focus on when it comes time to study.

Consistency is key when it comes to taking good, organized notes. It may seem intimidating or difficult at first, but you will thank yourself when a test comes around and you can spend more time studying and less time deciphering what your notes are trying to say!

Special thanks to nearly witches. and sindie synclayre for editing!