How to Take Notes in Class

The Comprehensive Guide

by J. E. Brown

Intended Audience: College students, professionals, and smart people of all ages.

Introduction: I Learned the Hard Way.

Recently I needed to relearn a mathematical technique, and so I went back to my old college notes. I was struck by how unreadable they were, loaded with incomplete sentences and words scribbled too fast to be legible. It was like reading a foreign language without knowing all the words, like every sentence had a word missing. Instantly I was sorry I had sold my textbook; no doubt the textbook was better organized and clearer, and would have quickly taught me what I wanted to learn.

My terrible notes were not helped even by the fact that I was a pretty good writer. Oh well — luckily I got better at note-taking over the years. Here are a few of the valuable note-taking tricks I learned after college:

Contents

• How to Reduce Eye Strain and Make Your Notes Readable
• Index Your Notes
• Hyperlinks — On Paper?
• Review and Complete Your Notes
• Your Notebook Is a Book
• Style Guide
• Lecture Tips
• Improve Your Textbooks
• Asking Questions
• Care and Maintenance of You, the Note-Taking Machine
• Tips to Help You Focus
• General Care of Notes
• Note Taking on the Web, and Note Taking with a Computer
• Methods of Study
• Original Pages on Note Taking
• Background
• About the Author

How to Reduce Eye Strain and Make Your Notes Readable:

• Consider using wide-ruled paper, not college-ruled. Studies have found that a person's attention span drops dramatically when print size shrinks. This can lead to daydreaming. Some tangent thinking and thought experiments are desirable during study, as long as you stay on topic, but you don't need your mind wandering while you cram for exams. Larger print keeps you focused.
• Try unlined paper. It looks brighter and cleaner. Try it for no other reason than it's good for your morale. Inkjet paper has a very clean look, especially for math work. If you want lines (ruling) to keep your handwriting straight and from sagging, put a sheet of ruled paper behind the unlined paper so that you can see the lines through the plain top sheet.

  You may still prefer lined paper if taking a history or writing or music class. But in math, science, and engineering, where graphs and diagrams rule, plain paper is a favorite. Preprinted ruling tends to camouflage the horizontal lines in diagrams.

  → Paper is most beautiful when there's no see-through or indentation, and so, you'll get the best results by placing a single sheet of paper (not a stack) on a dark desk; this way, the pressure of your pen won't dent or curl any pages while you write, and the dark background will camouflage any writing on the other side of the page.

  → If using thin typing paper, write on only one side.

  → If you're short on cash, use cheap paper for note-taking, but use the above techniques for your homework — your teacher will be impressed.

• Use a pen, never a pencil. As you walk to class, the jostling of the pages against each other will cause any pencil marks to slowly smear and transfer from leaf to leaf. This reduces legibility and increases your eye strain.

  Best pens: Paper Mate stick fine point, black. My least favorite: Bic round stic medium point — tends to blob, but readable if you can get a good one.

• If your ball-point pen often skips or blobs or fades, get rid of it. Always carry a spare. Or better yet, don't — asking a classmate for a pen is a wonderful way to break the ice. :^)
• Avoid dusty paper. The dust will gum up your pen.

Index Your Notes.

• Highlight the names of all major topics and terms for ease of location, just as if you were going to index them. If you don't have a highlighter pen with you, just draw rectangles around the major terms, and highlight them later. Whenever the lecturer moves on to a new major topic, write the name of the new topic, and highlight it.

  → When the lecturer moves on to a new minor topic, start a new paragraph. Later when you go back to read about this topic, you'll be able to see at a glance where the topic begins. I used to simply put a double slash ("//") and continue the line I was on, filling every available white space to save paper. I was really cheap back then ;^)

  I highlight in two colors: green for important concepts and facts, pink for indexable terms.

  → A broad horizontal line makes a great paragraph marker. You can't miss it.

• Date and number each page. Often you'll need to look something up by date, and you'll often want to write "see p. ____."

Hyperlinks — On Paper?

Hyperlinks aren't just for the Web anymore, and not just for web pages. They can help you organize your private files. Bloggers already know this.

Hyperlinks have existed on paper for hundreds of years. We call them tables of contents, and footnotes, and see-alsos, and citations, and concordances, and bibliographies, and indexes.

Your textbooks and notebooks should be cross-linked, just like the Web is.

Review and Complete Your Notes.

Complete your sentences. Review your notes. Some educational pundits say you shouldn't try to write everything down in complete sentences. But this is misleading advice. Better advice is to draft rough notes during class, intending to polish them later. Write down a few words and phrases that will jog your memory later, just for starters, and later when the lecture is over, go back and make the sentences complete or at least unambiguous. It may not be necessary to write everything down (and if it is, you need a tape recorder, because the lecturer is going too fast), but whatever sentences you choose to keep should be just grammatical enough to be understandable to you later. Great notes are like great writing: Not confusing, and not written in code nor in telegraph style. If you do write in code, at least choose a code that you can read without effort. Ambiguity wastes your time.

A word on timing: You can review your notes right after class, or (easier) you can review them while you're sitting waiting for the next lecture to begin. An important tradeoff can be expressed as follows: The sooner you intend to review and complete your notes, the faster you can write during lecture. But only you can be the judge of this — the only real determinant of how much you should write is how much you forget over time, and only you will know how much that is.

Any sentence that you don't remember how to complete is a question you need to ask your instructor or a classmate. Any such question represents a gap in your education, and you're not paying good money to have gaps in your education.

→ While reviewing, highlight any major lessons you learned. For students in engineering, math, and writing, this means highlighting any important tips and tools your instructor gives you.

Highlight whenever the professor gives you a tool. Hint: Tools are often found in sentences of the form "In order to verb" or just "To verb". ;^) This will remain a mystery to those of your classmates who haven't yet learned the difference between "to" and "too."

Your Notebook Is a Book.

In the middle ages, in the early days of the university system, a student's notebook (and his ability to memorize) might well be the only "textbook" that student would ever own. But nowadays, thanks to the printing press and the Internet and the easy availability of information, you and I are not limited to owning only our own hasty scribbles. Nowadays your knowledge is less limited by your writing speed and quickness in the classroom.

The modern student's notebook no longer needs to be an encyclopedia of facts. With the arrival of the World Wide Web, we no longer think of notebooks and articles as self-contained, but as part information and part links to other articles. Think of your notebook the same way. Your notebook is a road map, containing both facts and directions to facts: names of books, names of journal articles, names of important experts and authors and authorities. The whole world is becoming one big book, and your notebook should become an index into it.

• Treat your notes like a research product. In a very real sense, when you take notes you're writing a book — a book which only you will read, perhaps, but it's still a book, and the process is the same. I'm writing a book, so I know this: A book (like the set of notes it arises from) isn't just an afterthought or an annoying chore, it's the natural result of studying something. Consider this strange way of looking at it: In some cases the (note-)book is the main goal, and going to class is only a tool for building that book.

To complete your book of notes, you will need to do research (i.e. study the textbook and often the sources which it mentions); also you will benefit by talking to experts, and it's perfectly legitimate for you to interview (willing) people who have additional information, such as your professor, and even the other experts in his or her department; and nowadays we have the Internet, thank goodness — its information may not always be accurate, but at least it can give you valuable leads to follow, which will direct your research.

• Consider typing your notes. For years, experts have been saying that when you reprocess your notes this way, you improve your retention. I never took this advice in college, but nowadays we have word processors, which make my notes searchable. Search capability is essential to larger projects — it doesn't just make them easy, it makes them possible. Type your notes (at least type the indexable terms and concepts) for easy finding.
• Confused? Have questions? Write them down. Every project should have a to-do list, and in your notebook project, most of those to-do items will be questions about the material. Write only one question per line, and leave space (on the same line or in the margin) to write the answer. Use red ink to indicate urgency, and mark each item done when you've found answers.
• Make your questions, objections, and conjectures explicit in your notes, says Peter Suber.

  → Did your lecturer say something cryptic? For anything you don't immediately understand but don't want to ask a question on, because you know it'll be in the book, just write "- study" in red ink in the left margin.

Style Guide.

In your very own book, the only style that matters is the one you're comfortable with. Here are some ways to find your style:

• Word Choice: When writing notes, if you can't find a word that fits, just write the word you have, but put it in [brackets], with a blank empty space after it where you can write a better word if and when you find one. It's more important to go back to listening to the lecture; you can touch up the notes later.
• Brackets: Anything the instructor didn't say goes in brackets; unbracketed text is reserved for direct quotes. This notation will help you figure out later what's a direct quote and what was paraphrased. This includes all notes you write/add on your own initiative. Brackets help you keep straight what the instructor said and didn't say, which is useful to know if you ever have to say "But professor, you said ____" or if you someday publish your notes and wish to pay your professor the compliment of a quote.
• Abbreviations: The first time you use an abbreviation (or a new shorthand symbol), jot it in the margin, with its definition. Example: "b/c = because" means "I'll be writing 'b/c' in place of 'because' from now on."

  You can make up your own abbreviations. However, to prevent confusion, do not use abbreviations that are identical to or similar to other frequently-used words.

  → Study a bit of Braille. When I was young I heard that "ence" is the standard Braille abbreviation for "experience," and I've used it ever since. To experience a great list of Braille contractions, visit brl.org and click the letters A-Z.

• Shorthand: Shorthand words are all abbreviations, and so the same rules apply. Don't shorthand a word that you won't be using often; such words are better left in longhand or block letters, to make them easier to decipher.

  → In theory, shorthand symbols are phonetic, but experienced users of shorthand can read the symbols at a glance, like readers of Chinese do. Shorthand symbols can be read phonetically if necessary, but this is not the best use of your time. Write a word in shorthand only if you will be using that word often enough to keep its shorthand symbol familiar to you. Any symbol you use infrequently will soon be forgotten, and is better left in longhand.

• Cursive or Print Letters? Maybe the computer age made this obvious to me, but nowadays I like my hand-printing much better than my handwriting. Maybe the ability to touch-type has made me resent the slowness of the pen, or maybe the habit of typing everything means I don't practice my cursive enough, and so I've gotten sloppy at it. Your experience may vary.
• Use Decimal Page Numbers for faster lookup. Imagine that each book page is divided vertically into ten sections. So page 15 is made up of ten smaller divisions, called p. 15.0, p. 15.1, up to p. 15.9. Some people use only 9 divisions, numbered .1 to .9. See also Suber.

Lecture Tips:

• Keep Your Book Open. If your professor has a tendency to follow the book closely while lecturing, follow along in the book to help you understand the lecture. Most importantly, you don't need to take notes on what's already in the book. If you notice that your professor is writing an equation that also appears in the book, write only the page number or figure number or formula number in your notes (remember what I said earlier about hyperlinks). This way you can devote more time to listening.
• → It's not always possible to read the chapter before the lecturer covers it, but at least take a few minutes to skim the chapter before the lecture, just to get familiar with the section and subject headings. In no case should you read the book during the lecture, if only because lecturers often impart wisdom that isn't in the book, such as their own personal stories and experiences with the material, and these personal asides will help you to knit the material into a cohesive system of usable knowledge for your own use.
• Some professors lecture directly from the book, laboriously copying all equations and figures to the board. This is not the best use of their time nor yours, unless the professor adds value by adding detail.
• Should you read materials before class? Maybe not, if you have a really good instructor. But if you have one of those teachers who overuse pronouns and underuse examples, definitely read the book before the lecture, else you won't know where the lecturer is going and what he's hinting at.

Improve Your Textbooks.

• Don't be shy/timid about writing in the textbook. Especially in the index. Important concepts which do not appear in the index should be indexed — by you. Books with good quality indexes are hard to find, but you can repair a bad index.
• Textbooks are often incomplete; even a good textbook can have a poorly written chapter or sentence. Your job as a student is to complete the missing information. By doing so, you add value to the book.

→ It's better that your book be complete than clean.

→ Textbooks are sometimes confusing. If you feel confused, it may not be your fault. Even well-written textbooks have a few confusing or detail-poor paragraphs. Did your professor ever tell the class to visit the library and read books other than the required textbook? This is why. The time you might spend scratching your head is better spent walking to the library, or searching the web for other ways of understanding the material.

Asking Questions:

Don't be shy about asking questions if you don't understand something. I know, that's easier said than done ;^) .

Here are a few tips that will reduce your shyness:

• If you have a fear of speaking/asking questions in front of an audience, get to know a few of your classmates. Get on speaking terms with them. This does not mean asking them out. College friends and acquaintances may turn into job contacts later in life. If you get a chance to join a study group, try it at least once. You're not in school just to get an education. (see sidebar)

  → All of the really good reasons to join a study group are ulterior.

• The students who speak up in class will be the easiest to get to know. Sit with them. You'll feel less inhibited by association, and after you get on speaking terms with them, you'll feel more supported whenever you raise your hand in class.

→ Hint: If a classmate you don't yet know sneezes and you say "Bless you" and he or she ignores you, change seats and sit at a different desk in the future — in too many ways to count, it's bad luck to continue sitting next to unfriendly people. Especially those who bring viruses to class ;^)

Care and Maintenance of You, the Note-Taking Machine.

• Do everything you can to make sure you hear the entire lecture, from start to finish. Don't arrive late or daydream, because if you do, you'll want to ask questions that were already answered while you weren't present (so to speak), and who wants to be seen doing that? It's easier to ask a question if you know it wasn't already covered. Don't set yourself up to feel intimidated.

Tips to Help You Focus:

• Drink tea before class. I think I heard it boosts the attention span.
• Other legal stimulants: Peppermint and possibly spearmint are said to be helpful.
• If you often find yourself daydreaming, sit closer to the lecturer.
• Even if you do daydream or arrive late, it's OK to ask an occasional redundant question. If you feel this makes you look bad, you can always cover it later by asking a more intelligent question.
• In case of daydreaming, or if you find yourself reading during the lecture, ignore my earlier advice about opening the textbook during class. Try closing it.
• Stress can cause the mind to wander, and relationship stress is a major (if not the major) distraction. If you're dating or living with someone who emotionally abuses you, or who is flaky, unreliable, or disloyal, you need to end that relationship today. Your education comes first. Bad housemates and bad love interests may fail you and let you down, but a good education never will.
• Drowsy Foods: If you can't stay awake in your first class after lunch, try any of these, which worked for me: Eat a smaller lunch (but don't skip lunch); remove all simple carbohydrates (starches and sugars) from your lunch, including ramen, white bread and tortillas, rice, corn and potatoes, and eat them later in the day. There is a slight normal drop in mental acuity in early afternoon (sleep researchers call it the "post-lunch dip"), but the wrong choice of lunch (a high-calorie, high-carb lunch) can make it much worse.
• Also, difficulty breathing (especially overnight) can lead to daytime drowsiness, so try a decongestant spray or related product at bedtime. There is some risk of these sprays actually causing chronic "rebound" congestion, a kind of dependence, but in my opinion these risks have been exaggerated by book-learned doctors who do not suffer from congestion themselves. I am a sufferer, and I've learned how to use the sprays and which sprays to avoid.
• One study found that students who have more social contacts are less drowsy during the day. Sounds counterintuitive to me, but there it is. ;^)
• Miscellaneous: Hunger, tight shoes, cold symptoms, allergies, and many headaches are needless distractions, and can all be treated or masked without a prescription.
• Diuretics: Tea and at least one antihistamine (chlorpheniramine) have diuretic effects: they flush water out of the body. Adjust the timing of these and take them one hour earlier if they cause you to need a bathroom break at the ends of lectures.

General Care of Notes:

• Keep your notes for life. Never throw them away. If you later find a career in your chosen field or a related field, or if you're just naturally curious about the world, looking back on your old college notes can help you.
• In case of theft, periodically move your notes out of your notebook and file them in a safe place. Any notes you carry in your backpack or briefcase are at some risk of being lost.

  → Never loan your notes out. Getting them back can be difficult. Any notes you loan out must be photocopies. The originals must never leave your possession.

• Hyperlink your notes. When the instructor assigns reading, write the assigned page numbers in your notes, as a kind of hyperlink, a cross-reference. This makes the relevant reading and examples easy to find, long after the semester is over. And yes, this means you must….
• Keep your textbooks. I kept my college books, and I heartily recommend that you do the same. Yes, I use them. One of the kindest things your parents can do for you (I would imagine) is to say, "At the end of the semester, we will buy your books from you, and we'll keep them for you in case you ever need them again."
• Another reason to keep your books: Later I'll say you should study until your confusion and doubts and questions are gone. This is nice in theory, but in practice there may never be enough time to learn the material. You may have to settle for just learning where to find the material whenever you need it, and writing those directions in your notes. This reinforces what I said earlier: Hyperlink your books into your notes, and keep your books.

Note Taking on the Web, and Note Taking with a Computer.

In the 21^st century, note taking has new rules, new methods, and new tools.

• Keep a notebook file or do-file (one per project) always open on your computer desktop. When you have a useful thought, type it in.
• When you find a useful quote, copy and paste it into the file, along with today's date, author's name, article name if any, URL so you can find the article again, and the name of the file you saved the article to (if you think the original might go 404). If you agree or disagree with the author, add any thoughts or rebuttals you deem necessary. Type your notes in one color, and paste the excerpted text in a different color so you can tell/remember which ideas aren't yours.

  → Function Keys: It would be great if every web browser supported this "extended copy and paste with attribution" via a single function key. I call this concept "the research browser." The user presses a single function key, and the paste buffer loads itself instantly with a full citation, ready for pasting into any notebook file.

• Cache everything useful. It's much easier to relocate a paper on your hard drive than to find it a second time on the Web. Cache as cache can. Or, at the very least, copy the useful parts (with attribution) into your electronic diary. Similarly, when dealing with printed books, keep photocopies of the useful pages (be sure to know and obey the copyright laws, esp. the law that photocopying is allowed for purposes of scholarship), and if you need many pages, consider buying the used book in an online auction.

  → When writing this article, I meant to include a special example of a poorly written paragraph. The paragraph in question appeared in Einstein's popular book Relativity. But now that I need it, I find I copied the wrong page, and so I can't write that section. So that story became a good example for this paragraph instead. ;^)

  Moral #1: Skip Einstein and read Hawking's A Brief History of Time. You'll get more out of it.

  Moral #2: Never say "I don't need to keep a copy; I can find the original book or website again if I need it." Yeah, right.

Methods of Study.

• Some educators recommend two hours of study for each hour of lecture, but I disagree. If you have a passion for the subject, and certainly if you plan to make it your life's work, you should spend every available minute studying. At least, and by all means, rid yourself of the notion that studying will ever take a predictable amount of time. Certain topics and certain textbooks will puzzle the student, and the puzzled student can only find answers by hunting. This hunting, successfully completed, will make you an expert.
• Your textbook may list many problems. Your professor will rarely assign all of these problems as homework. Work all the problems in the textbook anyway, not necessarily on paper, but in your head. At least know how to solve each type of problem. If the textbook's author didn't design a wide variety or smörgåsbord of problems, use another book. You will learn more from those authors who really love and understand their topic enough to devote time to expanding the problems pages. Authors who are terse and reserved will teach you little, and it won't be fun.

Good Study Methods:

1. Study the text and notes until you understand the concepts. This might take five seconds, five minutes, or all day.
2. Some books don't explain well. A text should spell out all techniques and concepts, and not make you puzzle over them. If you suspect your textbook is incomplete or skips a step, try a different book.
3. If the text is wrong somewhere, or if the professor misspoke, or one seems to contradict the other, understand where and how.
4. You're finished reading/studying when your questions and your curiosity are satisfied.

The first purpose of study is to learn, learn, learn, for the sake of learning. The second purpose of study is to lose your confusion over the assigned reading and homework concepts.

1st Edition, 31 March 2006 

Original Pages on Note Taking

At other sites:

• Peter Suber, "Taking Notes on Philosophical Texts." Useful in many other fields.
• Natasha Houldson, "How to Take Notes in College"
• Possibly helpful: B. S. Bennett, "How to Take Notes in Lectures"
• "Electronic Notetaking" for deaf and hard-of-hearing people
• "Academics: Study Tips (How To Take Notes)"

Background

Before writing this article, I did a web search for helpful hints and related works. But most of the existing articles give short, pat, glib, tired, rehashed, oversimplified advice, clearly aimed at high school students. Unexplained aphorisms like "Keep your sentences as short as possible" might work for secondary students, but they will hobble you in college and beyond.

About the Author:

J. E. Brown, software engineer and repeat/returning student, is writing a category-based reference book, plus content categorization software to organize it. The software groups paragraphs by similarity, and may be suitable for linking a thesaurus or directory together.

Software such as this might someday make the Web self-organizing.

Concepts:

notetaking, how to study, study habits, study techniques

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Contact:

I charge $2.50 per question related to the above material, and more for questions involving research.

Copyright © 2006  J. E. Brown   all rights reserved.
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