Note-making

Note-making is an important aspect of studying at university. You may want to capture the key points in your lectures, or from your reading. Note-making can also be helpful for planning your assignments or preparing for exams.

This guide will cover:

• different styles of note-making for you to try
• digital note-making tips

There are lots of different options when it comes to note-making:

• Cornell method

• Mind maps

• Hand-drawn

• Diagrams, pictures, speech

• Annotation of texts (eg Mendeley, Ebook Central, Reading Lists)

• Separate from the text (eg OneNote)

Click on the image below to work through the online tutorial for note-making. The tutorial gives examples of all different methods of note-making mentioned above. There are activities for you to take part in along the way.

Pen and paper

This can be seen as the traditional method for taking notes. Obvious advantages are that it is low tech and can be done anywhere but there are some drawbacks. If you have a lots of notes then you will start to amass lots of paper. For many people this can be hard to organise and cumbersome to carry around.

Digital notes

There are a number of advantages of taking digital notes. 

• If your notes are on OneNote and linked to your OneDrive you can access them anywhere you can access the internet and your iPad. No more heavy bags full of paper notebooks.

• Digital notes can be amended as many times as you like, no more scruffy notes with lots of errors and crossing out.

• You can keyword search your own notes. Have you ever been in a situation where you have a vague memory of something your lecturer had said in a past session? With paper notes you would have to manually read through them all, but if your notes are digital you can search through all your notes instantly. In OneNote you can search your notes at any time by clicking on the spyglass.

TU My Digital Life has lots of great study tips. Below are two videos regarding note-making. 

Click on the image to see additional useful resources.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.