5 Steps To Taking Useful Notes For Revision

Why do you take notes?

One of these three answers might pop up:

"To retain subjects discussed during a lecture, which I cannot find in a textbook"

"To memorise subjects and understand them better"

"So that I can go over the content later while revising by using my own notes"

But this misses out on a key element:

When you take notes, you only write about what is important. Notes are a way by which you organise and prioritise information. If you write down one thing into your notes, but not another, you're probably only going to remember what you wrote down.

That's because your mind has now assigned more value to it.

So, for starters, don't copy the whole textbook!

First of all, it's going to take ages, and you don't want to be revising for ages. Second of all, you aren't organising the information in your own way. Memorising a whole textbook word by word will take years to do, yet that's what you're trying to do when you copy the textbook word for word.

So, what's the alternative?

Bulletpoints.

You know why they are called bullet points? Bullets are small, fast, and yet extremely effective.

Bullet points save you not only a lot of hours, but also a lot of writing cramps in your hand.

When you write in bulletpoints, you automatically already have to remove all the filler words and excess data that you find in every sentence. What you write down is only the keywords and the links between them.

A quick example:

Instead of writing down:

Scientists have found that the mitochondria produce ATP.

You could write:

• Mitochondria make ATP

Now, another thing which I've done here is replaced a longer word, produce, with a shorter word, make. Again, this saves time, but also, by expressing your notes in words different to those in the textbook, you spend more time with the information. Furthermore, you need to think and understand the information more, which isn't the case when you passively copy.

Step 2: Questions

While you are taking notes, write down questions on the content on a separate sheet of paper.

Again, keep the questions focused on the key concepts. Creating questions forces you to understand the information in even more depth. It makes you differentiate even further between what matters about the content and what doesn't. And this process is extremely important if you want to remember anything.

On top of that, once you sit down to study again in the future, you'll have a lovely list of questions to go through. This is a great active recall method, as you are forced to retrieve information from your mind, thereby further strengthening those neural connections.

Then, once you go through the questions, take the ones you can't answer, and take notes on only those topics. Remember, we want to make studying as efficient and effective as possible. So, only revise what you don't know yet. Throw in a revision session once every couple weeks to make sure you still know what you think you know, but mainly focus on what you don't know.

Step 3: Link between points

This is crucial. Textbooks organise information in one way. For notes to be effective, you need to organise it in a different way.

Many points actually link together. A quick example:

One one page in a biology textbook you might find this sentence: Some bacteria have a waxy outer layer to hide cell markers and potentially protect from antibodies.

On another page in a different chapter, you read: Mycobacterium Tuberculosis has a waxy outer layer.

The key strategy here is to join the points in your notes. If you are taking notes on the chapter with the first sentence, you could write:

• Waxy outer layer: In some bacteria, e.g. Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, protects from antibodies, hides cell markers.

And for the second topic:

• Mycobacterium Tuberculosis: Waxy outer layer; hides cell markers, protects from antibodies.

This allows you to see the network of connections between topics, which will help you understand the content in more depth. And if you understand something really well, you will remember it really well.

Step 4: Organise

If you are going to use your notes again in the future to revise, then this step is crucial. If you're just taking notes to process the information, but then after that you won't ever look at them again, skip this step completely. It'll just be a waste of time.

Use headers and sub headers. To save time, you want to find topics as quickly as possible, and headers really help with this. If you want, you can write headers in a different colour.

However, that's about as far as I would take colour coding. Writing every paragraph in a different colour can often be confusing during revision, and it doesn't give any extra benefit to help you retain the information. It can help with finding information again during revision, but if your notes are in bulletpoints and you have enough headers, then this should not be an issue.

Don't squeeze all the information onto one page. Make sure your text is generously spaced. This makes it a lot easier to read through again in the future. Also, after you're done with a topic on a page, start a new topic on a fresh page. This way, it's a lot easier to find topics and organise them later.

Step 5: Summarise

This is a short step. After every large chapter, write a short summary on the most important points. Try and keep it in the 5-10 sentence range. If you are going to use your notes again later for revision, then this is what you can quickly read through to see which topics you still need to revise.

Alternatively, you can use the questions you wrote down earlier to do this. Either way, it's a lot quicker than skimming over all your notes, or even worse, crawling through the textbook page by page.