Reading

Note-taking and note-making are an integral part of successful study and learning, helping you to organise and transform the content you hear or read into your own structure and words. But what’s the difference?

Note-taking is what you would do in a lecture or tutorial, capturing key ideas or messages. It helps you to listen actively and to retain the information.

Note-making is an active process for assimilation of information. It integrates notes taken in lectures with the information you gain from your readings. Note-making is the stage where you make meaning, seeing the connections between different sources and establishing a fuller picture of the topic. It’s a necessary step to increasing knowledge and understanding.

Note-taking strategies

Good notes are useful notes. They should be a stepping stone between the information you receive – from your lectures and readings – to enabling you to demonstrate your knowledge on a topic in an assignment.

So, how do you take good, useful notes? That all depends on you and your learning style. There are many ways of taking notes – we’re going to expand on a couple; however, if you don’t see anything that works for you, check out #studyspo for some inspiration (but remember, beautiful notes are only useful if they help you bridge the gap between information and knowledge).

All note-making styles do have a few things in common. When recording your notes:

• Keep your assignment question and thesis statement in mind as you read and take notes. It will help guide you to the most useful information in the source
• Record useful information in your own words, rather than copying from the source word for word. This is important in ensuring that you understand the content, as well as for avoiding accidental plagiarism
• Always record the details of the source for your reference list (and so that you can find it again!).

Watch this short video for 10 tips when note-making:

Let’s look at a couple of note-taking/note-making strategies - Cornell note-taking, mind mapping, and the outlining method - in more depth: 

Synthesising

Note-taking strategies can be used as you read a specific source and also when you are looking at the bigger picture, combining the things you’ve read, with the information presented in your lectures, along with any pre-existing ideas and opinions you have. This process of putting things together is when you begin to create connections and form a more complete picture of a topic, a process called synthesising.

When you synthesise you recognise areas of consensus in your research, points where there are common findings or ideas. You will also be able to see where there are different or contrasting ideas. Establishing these connections is a key step as you move towards writing your assignment.