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Why do I need to make good notes?
- Good notemaking skills are invaluable at university. The quality of your notes impacts directly on the quality of your writing and on your ability to revise and retain information for exams
- Making notes, as distinguished from taking notes, is the active process you engage in, thinking about the information you are describing.
How do I make good notes?
Try to be brief — either paraphrase or summarise the main ideas. This allows you to develop and demonstrate your analytical and critical thinking by interpreting and questioning the text, rather than merely copying it.
Effective notes should:
- highlight key points
- identify relevant supporting details such as examples, explanations, diagrams and other material
- separate key points from supporting details.
The Cornell notemaking method
The Cornell method is one of many systems of making notes that will help you extract meaningful and useful information from the books, journal articles and other sources that you are reading as part of your research.
As you make notes from each book, journal article or website, try to organise them into three columns (see Table 1):
- In the first column, record themes or key ideas from your reading.
- In the middle column, record the page number that the key idea was on, and maybe some notes or a direct quote.
- In the third column, record your own comments or questions about the key idea. This may include how or where you might use this in your assignment, how this links to other research you have done and comments about issues to be clarified. This column is important as it helps you to develop your critical thinking skills.
Table 1: Example of notes taken using the Cornell method
Author Wilson, A.B |
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Publisher Wiley & Sons |
Title How the new industrial relations legislation is causing declining standards of living in Australia. |
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Year 2007 |
Place of publication Brisbane |
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Theme |
Notes and quotes |
Comments and questions |
Job security |
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Find other stats to support this
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Family life |
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Look for other research/data to support this |
Financial strain |
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Investigate if there has been an increase in requests for welfare, i.e. Salvation Army, Lifeline stats (find examples) |
Concept mapping (also known as mind mapping)
Concept mapping (see Figure 1) can be used for many purposes, such as recording and organising existing information on a topic (see the QUT cite|write guide ‘Organising information’), preparing for exams and notemaking. When used for notemaking it helps:
- show the relationship between central ideas, topics, concepts or essential questions and supporting details
- create a visual impression of the information you have gathered.
Figure 1: Example of a concept map of ideas and notes taken from one source