HOW TO TAKE NOTES

READING: HOW TO HEAR STUFF & WRITE IT DOWN

You may think you were born with the ability to listen as teachers give lectures, but as every kindergarten teacher knows far too well, you had to learn to listen. Now, you're going to learn to listen better. If you merely sit and listen to a lecture without writing anything down or doing some kind of activity, you'll only remember about 20% of what you're hearing. That's not an awesome percentage.

Before we get to the part about writing stuff down, let's go over a few quick strategies that will help you hear the lecture better in the first place:

• Prepare for class. Your brain doesn't do so well when a ton of totally new information is thrown at it, so a lecture on a subject you know nothing about is difficult to listen to properly. Familiarize yourself with the topic by taking five minutes to Google it before class. If there's reading assigned, for the love of Cthulhu, do it. You're going to have to learn it all eventually anyway, so make the process easier by knowing what's going on.

• Engage with the subject. Remember how engaging with the subject can motivate you? It can also make lectures stick a little better. Even if you don't particularly care about the French Revolution, consider that it may be important to you in an extended way. Perhaps it gives the context for your fourth fave musical, Les Miserables? Maybe some of it sounds like stuff happening right now around the world or here at home? Stay on task by asking questions in class, and think about how insanely creepy guillotines are. 

• Don't get distracted. Even classrooms are full of distractions, like people rustling their papers, people texting beneath their desks, and that artistic kid next to you drawing those really cool dragons. If you're working at home, maybe your cat really wants to snuggle, or you can't stop thinking about that burrito you're going to eat. It may feel impossible, but try really, really hard to ignore them all. Focus on that French Revolution.

Taking Good Notes

By far the most effective way to maximize your listening powers is to take awesome notes. What, exactly, does awesome note-taking look like? It doesn't look like writing everything down verbatim as fast as you can and getting a hand cramp.

It also doesn't look like writing five keywords in the margin of the textbook with little stars next to them and a doodle or two.

We need the happy medium of only the essential information. That's the number one rule of note-taking. Good note taking is a fine art. However you do it, it should leave you with a legible record of all of the most important information you need to retain, and none of the extra fluff.

There are a ton of different strategies for taking notes. We'll start with some of the most basic, traditional note-taking styles, and then we'll move to some flashier stuff:

• Outlining. This is probably the most basic note-taking method out there. As you listen to a lecture, outline it as though it were a paper you were writing. Major subjects start on the far left of the page, and then lesser topics are indented beneath them. You don't generally write in full sentences, but you might stick in a few. Check out the doc below to see an example of what it might look like.