Note Taking: Why take notes?

Taking notes is a critical skill that can be developed with proper practice.

1) Focus: engage the text (annotate)

Fully engaging with the text means you will have to “mark up” the pages. Do not confuse annotating text with simply highlighting. You will need to: underline key terms, write questions and comments in the margins, use symbols (* ? ! ), number lists, etc. If the source is a textbook, you will have to take notes on a separate piece of paper. For this the Cornell method, if not its exact form, is recommended.

Key steps:

  • Review your lecture notes in advance and have them sitting next to you as you read. Any information in your lecture notes and also the text is noteworthy (see below), and it may be enough to simply highlight this point in your lecture notes rather than writing it anew in your reading notes.
  • You are NOT a stenographer; do NOT write notes simultaneously with reading. Read a section (usually a paragraph), consider the information, and then write your notes, otherwise it will distract you from actually reading the text and you will write far too much (in lecture listen, process, write).
  • You are not writing a textbook in your note book. You do NOT have to write down all the specific details from the text: you need just enough information in your notes to remind yourself what the specifics were and where they are if you need them later. This is a case where less is more: if you write down every factoid, the important, testable information and ideas will be lost in a thicket that you won’t remember on the test anyway. However…
  • You may tend to over-note and note erroneously at this stage because you aren’t sure what is and is not important, and that’s fine so long as you have a clearand accurate system to highlight crucial information. Do not start this process, paraphrasing, until you are SURE what the most important information is.

2) Memory: take notes on your notes (paraphrase)

Notes are a study guide for the future: a day, a week, a month, a year. After you have annotated the text, you will need to take notes on your notes to help quickly activate your memory at this later time. After you have read something, the information gets stored to some degree in your brain; your notes are the map that leads you back to where you stored the information. A map with too many details can be just as bad as one with too few.

If annotation is about analysis—tearing the text apart into its parts—paraphrasing is the first pass at a synthesis of the text—putting the pieces back together into an intelligible whole. It is a first pass because you may not fully understand the text, and therefore not be able to summarize it, until after you have completed this step.

Keysteps:

  • Make sure that if there were any parts of the text you didn’t understand or you have questions about that you clearly mark these up. If you can’t answer them by the end of this process, this may be a sign that you missed something from the reading (go back), or there may not be enough information from the text, so you need to ask about it ASAP.
  • Mark any information in the text that is related to questions that need to be answered (for homework, as part of research paper, etc.).
  • Mark any cause and effect relationships (usually draw an arrow between or number the steps)
  • Mark any information that was emphasized in another text, lecture, or discussion (if the teacher spent 10 minutes talking about how the Marshall Plan was part of the Cold War in class, and the text also discusses this fact, that would be an important piece of information). This is why you should review your lecture notes that relate to this reading beforehand and may want to have them sitting next to you; you can then make a mark on both sets of notes.

3) Understanding: identify/write thesis statement (summarize)

In mysteries and thrillers, as the plot unfolds previously innocuous events take on new meaning; some seemingly innocent statement becomes a confession once new information is learned. The same is true in reading any text;initial impressions of the text give way to more profound understandings. Once a first reading of the text is finished, a perceptive reader will see the need to reread those sections which contains key information—that is information that offers a more accurate or sophisticated understanding. The best way to test your level of understanding is to write a thesis statement. This may take several sentences because the thesis will capture the overall argument (purpose) of the author as well as an acknowledgement of the topics necessary to prove the argument.

Keysteps:

  • Even if the author has provided you with a clear thesis statement, you should still reword it into your own so that: 1) you are more likely to remember it and 2) in case other information you have about the topic needs to be incorporated into your understanding. What this text means in the context of other works may be important; e.g. a textbook written in the South in the 1950s about Reconstruction will make a particular argument because of when and where it was written.
  • Your thesis must be 1) an accurate statement of the author’s argument and 2) it must account for all of the critical information and argument presented in the piece. A thesis that accounts for only a part of a piece is insufficient.
  • The thesis is the most important note you can take: months later you can read this sentence(s) and it should activate all the crucial information of the text that you will need to remember. You may not remember everything about the text, but you will remember the most important information, including a surprising amount of detail.