How to take notes that are ACTUALLY useful!

Notes are a form of passive recall, so most of the time, they’re not super useful. However, it’s important to take notes in class (and outside!), since they’re a great way to gather all your knowledge in one place. Luckily, there are some things you can do to make your note-taking more effective!

Use the specification

Pretty much every subject and every curriculum has a spec: a list of things you need to know. You can use this to make your notes to ensure that you’ll cover all the content! As well as this, you can use it as a checklist to check that you haven’t missed anything.

Try blurting

Blurting is essentially when you recall all of the information about a topic. You can use blurting by reading the textbook then covering it while making your notes! This is a great way to include active recall in your note-taking process, which improves your long-term memory of a topic!

Keep your notes short

Try to limit your notes to one page per topic or a couple of lines per subtopic. This forces you to understand the concept because you’ll have to summarise it. As well as this, it prevents you from copying the textbook down word-for-word! Finally, it saves time since you won’t spend as long writing your notes 🙂 One great way to shorten your notes is by using abbreviations (like govt. for government) or by using people’s initials (like DLG for David Lloyd George).

Make it engaging

By making your notes visually engaging, you’ll want to review them more later! Try to include lots of diagrams or graphs, since these can help you understand a topic. Colour-coding is another great way to make your notes both more fun and organised! Using clear headings is also important for organising information logically 🙂

Review your notes

If you just make notes and never look at them again, you won’t learn much from them. Make sure you review your notes regularly to keep the information in your memory. Try to interact with your notes by reading them then saying a short summary – this is also a form of active recall which can improve your long-term memory of the topic!