First things first, I choose to take notes by hand in lectures and seminars, because I prefer having a hard copy of everything, however laptops are optional if you prefer taking notes that way. If so, though, this post probably won't help you very much. Because I already knew I preferred taking notes by hand, before I moved to uni, my mum bought me a lot of stationary, including pens, pencils, highlighters, and most importantly, separated note books.
The ones that we bought were Pukka Pad. Because I do a combined honours degree, I bought 1 notepad for each subject that I study. These notepads are great because not only do they have a pouch to store extra pieces of paper before every new section, they have labels which you can write the title of each section in the sections tab. I use these to separate my different modules.
As well as labelling each section, I like to begin my notes with the date, the week of the school year, the module name, and whether the notes are from a lecture or seminar.
Lectures and seminars are different types of lesson. A lecture is teacher-led, and my lecture notes are a combination of what is on the powerpoint screen and what the lecturer is saying. Some people like to print the lecture slides off before each lecture and annotate them, however a lot of my lecture slides don't get put up until after the lecture, and printing off each powerpoint would cost a lot of money that, as a student, I don't have.
Seminars, however, are more student based and the tutor will give you a series of different tasks to do, often relating to the seminar prep that they set in advance. In my Core English module, for example, my tutor sets us around 10-15 questions to do each week. What I like to do, however this is personal preference only, is to write the questions and answers in a different colour, and when we discuss the answers in class, anything I didn't write down, I would annotate around in a third colour. This is a really useful way to distinguish between the question, my ideas, and the ideas of my peers.
When I am planning essays, especially in English, I make a simple plan outlining the different paragraphs I want to write and quotes I want to put in, separating out the plan by colour-coding each paragraph.
After making this brief plan, I like to create a more in-depth plan on plain A4 printer paper and staple it into the notebook alongside my other plan. As I am quite a visual learner, I like to draw pictures alongside my plan, to make the whole document prettier to look at.
The final thing that I am going to write about is note-taking from books. I am a book annotating kind of gal. I know loads of people hate annotating in their books as it 'ruins it' but after taking English Literature for so many years, the thought of vandalising a book with my own ideas and knowledge really doesn't bother me anymore. I like to write a brief summary of the chapter/act at the beginning, before highlighting important/interesting parts of text, and writing my thoughts about why they are important/interesting/what literary techniques they use etc. etc.
However, when the book isn't mine, e.g a text book or library book, I like to mark the page with sticky page holders, before taking notes on a sticky note and placing it on that page. If the book has to go back before I will be done with the information, I write the author, title, publishing information and page number on each sticky note so that I can know where I quoted/paraphrased from and so not get punished for plagiarism.
I also keep all my hand outs from lectures and seminars in ring-binders, one for each subject, with dividers inside to separate each module. (I am not going to photograph those though because boring.)
This post has been a little less exciting and more serious/advice-like than my previous posts, so feel free to let me know in the comments whether you like or dislike this type of blog post.
With love,
Chloe x
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