As with all aspects of your academic performance, good note taking skills take time to develop. If your school prepared you well for university life, then you should not be shocked to find that a 55 minute lecture translates into 55 minutes of listening and note taking. Effective note taking can make a huge difference to your academic performance later in your degree. But are your note taking skills lagging behind? Here’s how to transform your note taking.
Date and Title
The first thing you should always do before you start taking notes is to add the date and title to the top of your notes. It may seem insignificant as you sit through your first Shakespeare lecture of the semester. But dates and titles are crucial. They can help you to organise your notes into the chronological order of weeks. This will make filing notes away in your folder for later reference much easier.
Abbreviations
Note taking is not the same as writing a grammatically correct, perfect piece of work for your end of semester assignment. Lecturers will only pause for breath rather than for students to be able to write down every single word that they utter. That means students must learn early on to make good use of abbreviations. But rather than using a random method of abbreviations, they must use a system that they find comfortable. Students must also be able to look back on their notes and work out what each abbreviation stands for; otherwise it defeats the purpose of using abbreviations.
Key Concepts
Note taking teaches university students to discipline themselves and only record key concepts in their notes. It is no use watching other students around the lecture hall as they hang on every word of the lecturer. That will not help to improve the important skill of note taking. Rather, each student must learn to only record key concepts in their notes. Dates, times, places and other relevant details can be included, rather than superfluous detail that is irrelevant.
Re-write Notes
It may seem like a waste of time to re-write notes later on in the evening, but this serves two main purposes. First, it is a good memory aid that can help students grasp the topic in more depth. This also gives students the opportunity to prune notes down to a neater, tidier and more concise set of notes, containing bold sub headings, and line breaks that make it easier on the eye.
Note taking is a very valuable tool in university. It is a skill that can help students to recall individual lectures with more ease, revise for exams in less time and write essays without having to wade through reams of notes.
