Note Taking

We all know that there is no single right way to take and store notes, rather there are more and less efficient ways and it's best to find one that suits your own style. Take a moment to reflect on your existing habits before we go on to explore options that may be more efficient and productive.

There are many ways to take notes, but not all are dependent on personal styles. Before commencing note taking, you should consider purpose, structure and method.

Purpose

Before you begin to read and take notes, you should consider your purpose. Are you taking the notes:

Considering the purpose should help you decide what and how much to write down or to underline, and help you decide how actively you may need to respond to the reading.

Structure

How do you structure your notes?

Method

Marking up or annotating texts

The practice of underlining or highlighting your texts can be very useful to find information quickly later. However, a drawback of this method can be the indiscriminate marking up of information, resulting in less useful information later. There is a danger in simply deciding 'underline or not underline?' instead of thinking about the content of the text as you read.

Diagrammatic approaches

After reading a text, you may like to construct a mind map, concept map or flow chart. These can be useful to review material or to gain an overview of a topic. Diagrams can also be quite useful when brainstorming for an essay or report to map out your ideas and identify the relationships between them.

Transformative approaches

Paraphrasing and summarising are the main ways of transforming a text into your own words for future reference. The important thing to remember about these methods is that you need to remain true to the author's argument and attribute credit for the argument to the author (that is, be quite clear about what is the author's idea and what is yours). For more information on appropriate paraphrasing and referencing go to the section on Incorporating Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism.

Analytic approach

When you need to critique what you are reading, such as when you are working to construct your own argument after comparing and contrasting a number of authors on your topic, you will need to have an analytic approach. You may indicate strong points, inconsistencies, weak points, refutations, controversial statements, similarities and differences, and so on, to help you work out your own position on the topic.

It can help to go back to your purpose to consider the most important aspects to include in your notes. Three different types of information you may wish to consider are:

Further Reading

Index