“I don’t understand what my notes mean!” “I can’t find my notes for Term 2, Week 4!” “I’m not going to be able to study from these notes!”
These are all things you DO NOT want to be saying the day before your exam, or two days before your assignment deadline. This is why you need to make sure that your notes are exactly what you need to give you the most amount of useful information with the least amount of stress! The following are some tips about note taking!
Focus on what the lecturer is saying when writing your notes in the lecture, NOT just on what is written on the slides! – In the first couple of weeks of term 1, I was extremely focused on making sure I got every little thing on the PowerPoint slides written down in my notes! This often meant that I was missing out on what the lecturer is saying, so I was leaving each lecture without a full understanding of what the lecture was about. When it came to exams or assignments, I would feel that my notes weren’t enough to show that I understood the concepts. This is because my notes were literally the summarised version of the information from the PowerPoint slides copied down word for word, rather than the actual explanations and justifications that the lecturer had been speaking about in the lecture. Don’t forget, the stuff in the PowerPoint slides is just an extremely basic, simple, and summarised version of all the amazing things your lecturer talks about in the lectures! It soon came to my attention that my lecturer was posting the PowerPoint slides on Moodle anyways (even if your lecturer doesn’t do this, you should be able to email them for a copy of the slides)! This way, you can spend the lecture only noting down what your lecturer said, and you’ll have both the information in the slides AND the information your lecturer said in your notes in the end!
Spend some time trying to figure out what kind of learner you are! – I cannot emphasise how many different kinds of learners there are in the world, and how important it is to know what works best for YOU! I won’t go into too much detail about the different types of learning in this blog, but I’ll give you a few examples! There are a few learning styles: visual, kinaesthetic, aural, social, solitary, verbal and logical! If you already know what learning style or styles work best for you, adapt your notes to that!
Stay organised- Have lots of folders in your computer! For every year, for every term, for every module, for every week, for every type of note. So, for every single week for every single module, you’ll have a folder for seminar notes, lecture notes, reading notes, assessment notes, etc.! It sounds disgusting having to be this organised, and quite honestly, it is disgusting being this organised. What I CAN say, however, is when you’re doing some last-minute revision, it’s so much easier and less time consuming when you know exactly where your notes are, rather than going through all your downloads from Moodle from back in October 2023.
Stay consistent- Please stay consistent with your notetaking! If you’ve got fantastic information from weeks 1-3, but not as much information for weeks 4-5.. you’re really going to beat yourself up if your assignment or exam ends up being about week 5!
Start writing your notes in a way that will benefit you for your exam or assignment early instead of being lazy with it! – From the beginning, try to phrase your notes in a way so that you can use the information easily in your essays! This way, you’ll already have a couple of readings and great information that you can easily slot into your work! Examples of this can be already starting to think about your notes from a critical point of view, having your notes in your own words (this is also useful as you can write your notes in a way that you understand the most!), and having names of people involved down that you can use for your citations and references!
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