Good notes are your insurance against forgetting. Learn to take notes efficiently in class and as you read books. Even for the printed notes that the teachers may give, or the text book teachers follow, it would be useful to write your own notes. They are particularly useful at the vigil of your exams, saves you time and energy. Your notes should be neat and orderly, easy to revise. More about this later. Keep also a record of the date of submission of your assignments and homework, and dates of tests announced.
There are different occasions that a student has to take notes, viz. While listening to a lecture, or while reading a book. The hints we are suggesting here could be applied to any type of writing notes and particularly taking notes to write a scientific work.
Different Materials for Taking Notes
There are different materials for taking notes, it depends on your interests and the purpose of the notes. Each material has its own advantages and disadvantages.
a. Note Books: They are useful in taking down class notes. No page can easily be lost. However the possibility of rearranging them very little. A4 size or foolscap size notebooks are more useful than the smaller size exercise books, as this gives you larger amount of written text at one glance.
b. Loose sheets: They have better possibility of rearranging. However they can easily be lost or misplaced or mixed up. This can be solved by filing them properly. But it is not easy to carry around the file as may be the case with notebooks.
c. Cards (or even small papers of equal size = scades) These are useful particularly in preparing talks and writing scientific papers. This will be explained in detail on a later section. This is very useful in collecting quotations and stories, very handy for public speaking.
Hints on how to improve your note-taking
1. Take notes in such a way that it will be immediately useful. Classify them, it you are using loose sheets or cards, in such a way that the arrangement and the finding of what you want will be easy.
2. One need not take down all that the teacher or the books says. It should be short and precise. What really matters is, that you understand the argument, and synthesize what you understand. However, in philosophy, certain vocabulary that the teacher uses could be very vital to explain the concept. Hence it is important to put them down.
3. The notes should be in your own words, as far as possible. It should be the translation of the thought of the author or the teacher.
4. Remember, taking notes makes you extra attentive while listening or reading. Therefore even if you things the notes are not going to be useful in the future, it may help you to be more attentive if you keep scribbling something while reading or listening to a lecture.
5. Be creative: in making use of symbols, shortcuts, abbreviations while taking notes for your own self.
Cornell’s method of taking notes
There are many methods of taking notes. I suggest here a method that is most suitable for social sciences. For this method the unruled foolscape or A4 size notebooks or papers are the ideal. The paper is used in the landscape fashion divided into three columns. Each column will contain different aspects of the notes as explained below.
| Column I | Column II | Column III |
| Smallest of all the three | The largest of all columns | Of medium size |
| Used for writing Headings &
Short notes. The latter could be filled while revising your notes |
Used for writing running notes, in full. This is the main section of your notes |
Used for writing your questions
Reflections Extra-reading & Related matter |