Note taking that is worth the time
Beautiful notes and good notes are different things, and the first can quietly prevent the second.
The transcription trap
The default way to take notes is to write down what is said, as fully as you can keep up with. It feels responsible. The problem is that transcription can be done almost without understanding: words go in through the ears and out through the hand, and the part of you that would have been deciding what matters never gets involved.
You can tell it has happened when you read the notes a month later and they are simultaneously complete and useless. Everything is there. None of it is yours.
Notes should be a decision, not a recording
The useful version is selective. You are choosing, continuously, what matters enough to write. That choosing is the learning. A few ways to force it:
- Write in your own words. If you cannot rephrase it, you have found something you do not understand, which is worth knowing now rather than in April.
- Leave the left third of the page empty. This is the Cornell layout: notes on the right, questions in the margin afterwards, a summary at the bottom. The margin is what turns the page into something you can test yourself with.
- Write questions, not just statements. A note that says “Why does the reaction slow as it proceeds?” is revisable. A note that says “rate decreases over time” is a fact you will read past.
By hand or on a laptop?
You have probably seen the claim that handwriting beats typing, from a 2014 study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. Their argument was that typing is fast enough to permit transcription, while handwriting forces you to summarise. It is a good story and a plausible mechanism.
It is also a finding that later replication attempts have had a harder time with than the popular write-ups suggest, so hold it loosely. The defensible version is narrower: the risk is transcription, not the keyboard. If typing makes you transcribe, write by hand. If you can type selectively, type. The mechanism matters more than the tool.
Notes are an input, not an output
Here is the part that changes how people work. Taking notes is not revision. Rewriting notes neatly is not revision either, and it is one of the most efficient ways to spend six hours and learn nothing, because it is copying with extra steps.
Notes earn their keep when you use them to test yourself: cover the page, answer the margin questions, then check. If a set of notes cannot be used that way, it is the wrong shape, and the fix is to add the questions rather than to rewrite the prose.
A good test of any set of notes: could someone hand them to you as a quiz? If not, they are a record of a lesson rather than a revision tool.
A workable routine
- In the lesson. Selective notes, your own words, gaps where you got lost.
- Same evening, five minutes. Fill the gaps, add three or four margin questions, write a two-line summary at the bottom. This is the step everyone skips and it is where most of the value is.
- Later, in a round. Cover the notes, answer your own questions, check.
Five minutes on the evening of the lesson is worth more than an hour of rewriting in May, because it happens while you can still remember what the lesson meant.