The importance of good notes

If you take notes efficiently, you can read with more understanding and also save time and frustration when you come to write your paper.

Taking good notes while reading is an important part of academic success in college. Most courses require significant reading, and it can be difficult to understand and master the material and do well in class without solid note taking and reading skills.

Good notes from your reading can help you:

• organize your ideas and information from the text
• keep focused and stay engaged while reading
• keep a record of what you read so you can more easily locate it in the future
• think critically about what you read while you read
• draw conclusions and identify main ideas of the text
• be prepared for class and build a foundation for lecture
• have solid materials to use to study for exams or prepare for assignments

Know what kind of ideas you need to record

Focus your approach to the topic before you start detailed research. Then you will read with a purpose in mind, and you will be able to sort out relevant ideas.

• Review the commonly known facts about your topic, and also become aware of the range of thinking and opinions on it. Review your class notes and textbook and browse in an encyclopaedia or other reference work.
• Make a preliminary list of the subtopics you would expect to find in your reading. These will guide your attention and may come in handy as labels for notes.
• Choose a component or angle that interests you, perhaps one on which there is already some controversy. Now formulate your research question, not just what but how. or why of your topic. 
• Then you will know what to look for in your research reading: facts and theories that help answer your question, and other people’s opinions about whether specific answers are good ones.

Different formats/strategies for notes

There is no one right way to take notes while reading. The important thing is that you experiment with a few effective strategies, find some that work for you, and use them. You may find that different formats or strategies work better for different types of texts, too, and you may want to use different ones for different classes. Below are some examples to try:

Your essay must be an expression of your own thinking, not a patchwork of borrowed ideas. Plan therefore to invest your research time in understanding your sources and integrating them into your own thinking. Your note cards or note sheets will record only ideas that are relevant to your focus on the topic; and they will mostly summarize rather than quote.

1. Don’t write down too much
2. Copy out exact words only when the ideas are memorably phrased or surprisingly expressed—when you might use them as actual quotations in your essay
3. Compress ideas in your own words.
4. Choose the most important ideas and write them down as labels or headings. Then fill in with a few subpoints that explain or exemplify.
5. Don’t depend on underlining and highlighting. Find your own words for notes in the margin (or on “sticky” notes)
6. Try taking notes from memory.
7.  Read smaller chunks, write notes, continue reading.

Label your notes intelligently

Whether you use cards or pages for note-taking, take notes in a way that allows for later use.

1. Make citations easy by writing down info from the get go.  Later you will be able to quickly identify author name and page number, etc.
2. One note = one sheet of paper. This will let you label the topic of each note. Not only will that keep your notetaking focused, but it will also allow for grouping and synthesizing of ideas later. It is especially satisfying to shuffle notes and see how the conjunctions create new ideas—yours.
3. Leave space for comments, questions, reactions, second thoughts, cross-references.