Note Taking Methods: Paper vs Electronic
- Tara Hodgson
- Dec 18, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 25, 2021
I am going to be talking about note taking methods and paper vs. electronic notes at the end of this post, but to set that up here are some skills that are super useful when taking notes. These are more for textbooks than lecture notes since they’re going to be covered in more detail in one of the later posts (hopefully).
Many of these came from the book Writing a Dissertation for Dummies, with some of my own elaboration or additions. If you don’t have the time/ money or resources to read this book then this is essentially a summary of part of the advice in the book, but I highly recommend you check it out. It was so useful to me when I was doing my dissertation.
You want to get the general meaning or gist of whatever passage you’re reading, not word for word and not too general since you want it to be useful.
Use some shorthand/ develop your own. Like I always use w/o to mean without, w/ to mean with and so on. I also skip words like ‘the’ and ‘a’ in my notes and other unneeded words like that. (I’ll admit I took inspiration from this from learning High Valyrian because Duolingo exists and has a course on it).
Skim the textbook first then write. Sometimes an idea is briefly mentioned early on and then more detail is added later so instead of having it in two chunks why not just wait and write about all of that idea together.
Distinguish between summaries and commentaries. A summary is where the facts or what is written is presented, giving the main points of whatever it is. A commentary on the other hand is your views and opinions (or a critic’s).
One way to distinguish between commentary and summary that I’ve found is to use different coloured post it notes. So I use yellow for summary and pink for commentary and analysis. I’ll stick these in the textbook and write on them as I’m going through each page and then at the end of the chapter gather the notes together and write them up.
An idea I’m not as fond of but that is still useful is to make a table to record the summaries/ commentaries for what you’re reading. So put Author(s), title of article, name of journal, date/ volume/ edition and page numbers in one section. Underneath that write the main points of the article/ whatever you read. That’s your summary. Then underneath that the commentary begins; write what you agree with and disagree with from what you’ve just read, what was useful and the drawbacks (e.g. from a very specific school of thought that doesn’t allow for any alternate viewpoints, restrictions on publications). After this is how it fits with your dissertation; how the article fits, links with other authors and what sections of your dissertation it’s relevant to.
How do you write out quotes from textbooks/ sources? Well, “twelve words or less goes in these quote marks”
Indented quotes like this don’t require quote marks and are for 12-40 words
And if you’re using “quotes” (p. 4) mixed in with your own text “like this” (p. 4) you write the quotes in speech marks/ inverted commas with the in text citation after it.
And one final bit of advice – don’t plagiarise. Keep careful notes about what you take and where it’s from as soon as you start, these will make up your bibliography and it’s way easier to do this sooner rather than later. Trust me. You don’t want to be the one that’s frantically searching for that specific edition you got out of the library a week ago.
Hey! Tara here, and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and I also talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.
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