From a student's perspective, nothing can be more critical than taking effective notes so that he / she gains the most out of the class lectures or the thick course books. For as easy as it may sound, notes making can be a painful activity if you are not good at it. While most of the students relate effective notes making to their writing speed, the truth remains that notes making has a number of other aspects attached to it, apart from a good writing speed.
If you have been facing trouble while making academic notes, we have a number of tips for you that would go a long way in assisting your notes making habit.
Organization
The most basic element of notes making is the organization. Your ability to remember the information in your notes is directly proportional to the organization of your notes. You must remember that the basic idea behind notes making is to keep it shorter than the original text so that it is easier to remember. Usage of keywords also holds the key to good notes making. You must use the kind of keywords that trigger much larger information in your mind. Shorter sentences and clever keywords are essential in notes making.
Make it your own
Many students tend to write down the exact verbatim of their teacher in the name of notes making. This is a useless exercise since you aren't making things any easier for you. The notes must be written in the language that you are comfortable with. Just penning out teacher's vocabulary isn't going to help much when you sit down to revise your notes at a later stage.
Choose what to write
Not everything that you hear or read is to be written in your notes. You must wisely choose the information that needs to be included in the notes. More than choosing what needs to be included, what is critical is to decide what is to be left out. The whole purpose behind making notes is to remember the complete information by just looking at a few lines. If you achieve that, consider your job done!
Don't be afraid to improvise
You take down notes for your own usage. Therefore, these need not be clearly written in a paragraph format to be pleasing to be eyes of others. Making notes in the form of graphs or flowcharts to understand the process is an effective technique used by a number of students. Usage of bullet points, tricky small words, or anything which would make you remember the information, is highly welcome!
This is not an exhaustive list. You can and must easily derive out more such effective techniques for yourself. And when you do it, let us know in the comments below.
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