Taking Effective Notes

People learn and remember information differently (see Assessing Your Skills and Needs) but most of us find that writing things down—taking notes—helps us remember what we hear in lecture, see on a screen, or read in print. The goal is not to reproduce the information we take in but rather to summarize and connect it in a form that makes sense to us. Good notes are signposts that lead our memories back to the detailed information stored there.

Formats for Notes

You can take effective notes in several different formats, depending on the material and your preference:

• Outline (I, II; a, b; 1, 2; etc.) when the lecture or reading is already clearly organized with major and subsidiary points.
• Use a Map to link concepts, ideas, questions, and facts that pop up at different places in the reading or lecture. Devise your own system of different size shapes and connecting lines to indicate items of greater and lesser importance.
• When you need to assemble lots of facts (organic chemistry?) place them in a table so that you can compare across categories. If you have blank cells, go back to the lecture, if it's online, or to the reading to get the missing information.
• Note cards are also good for organizing facts or characteristics. They're easy to carry and use when you have just a minute or two for review.

Note-Taking Methods

The best note-taking system may be the one you invent, using symbols and formats most meaningul for you. But try out the widely-used Cornell Method and see if it works for you.

Cornell Method: Cornell University's Learning Strategies Center posts a useful PDF illustrating how to divide a sheet of paper into areas for different levels of notes.

Especially toward the end of the term, when you have lots of pages of notes and need to extract the highlights, try the Silver Dollar System, described by Professor Walter Pauk (coincidentally also of Cornell University) in his classic How to Study in College (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 6th ed., 1997, p. 102).

Silver Dollar System:

Read through your notes and make an S in the margin next to any idea that seems important. Depending on the number of pages of notes you read, you'll probably wind up with several dozen S's.

Now read only the notes you have flagged with an S. As you go through these flagged notes for a second time, select the ideas that seem particularly important, and draw a vertical line through the S's that are next to them. Your symbol will look like this: $.

Make a third and final pass through your notes, reading only those ideas that have been marked $. Out of these notes, mark the truly outstanding ideas—there will be only a handful of them—with another vertical line so your markings will look like dollar signs: $ [old-fashioned ones with two parallel vertical lines across the S].

The Silver Dollar System shows you at a glance which ideas are crucial to remember and which are not. The $ sign alerts you to the truly important ideas, the "Silver Dollar" ideas that should receive most of your attention. Next come the [single-line] $ ideas; they are worthy but shouldn't clutter up your memory if you have a lot to remember in a limited amount of time. Finally, the S ideas can be ignored. Although you flagged these as potentially important ideas, since then you've twice marked ideas that were even more important.

In normal circumstances, deciding what's important can be a time-consuming and even frightening experience. It requires real courage to select just a few ideas from pages and pages of notes and ignore the rest. With this system, you can select the Silver Dollar ideas gradually and relatively easily.

Also check out material on note-taking on the Prentice-Hall Student Success site.