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Taking notes is about capturing and organising information in a way that helps your understanding, improves your recall, and ultimately makes learning easier and quicker. Whether you're attending a lecture, conducting your own research, or reading a text, effective note-taking is an important skill both in college and in general life. There are lots of techniques to help you improve your note-taking, so take a look at some of the techniques and resources below and hopefully you will find something that suits you and your learning style.

Mind mapping is a visual technique to help you organise and connect ideas. It can be a great way to record your notes, especially if you're a visual learner. Start with a central topic or idea, then create branches of subtopics or supporting details. Using different colours, symbols, and shapes can help enhance your understanding and tap into your creativity.

Mind maps can be very flexible and allow for non-linear note-taking.

This is perhaps the most common form of note-taking, as it's very simple and easy to use. It involves a hierarchical approach to taking notes using headings, sub-headings and bullet points, numbered lists or roman numerals. Outlining provides a structured framework that organises information and helps you see relationships between different ideas. For example...

Charting is a useful way of recording notes when you want to compare and contrast information. Create a table or grid using columns and rows representing different categories or factors. This is particularly useful for subjects like history or science, where you need to identify patterns, dates, or relationships.

The sentence method involves recording your notes as complete sentences. With each new idea or concept, begin a new line with a new sentence.

Where other techniques might focus on keywords or phrases and more structures approaches to recording information, the advantage of the sentence method is to create notes that are clear and easily read and can be written quickly without much structure. This might make it easier for you to understand and digest information when reading back on your notes, or be suitable to get your notes down quickly in a fast paced lecture.

Example...