How to Take Notes While Reading a Book
Note-taking is an incredibly powerful tool for learning.
Notes extend your memories. I've explained before how writing can exist seen as an external enhancement of your encephalon, allowing you lot to call back more complicated thoughts and solve harder bug. Notes you continue, therefore, act to expand your retentiveness.
Notes enhance your focus. The deed of taking notes ensures your mind isn't wandering. Even amend, notes tin facilitate deeper processing of the material, which has been shown to ameliorate memory than when you pay attention just to the superficial details.
Unfortunately, notation-taking is often easier and more natural when yous're listening to something, than when yous're reading.
Why Taking Notes While Reading is Harder
Taking notes while listening is generally easier because, while listening, your hands and eyes are gratuitous to jot downwards notes. On the other hand, switching away to have notes while reading inevitably interrupts the reading menses.
This intermission leads to a trade-off. Too few notes and you surrender the powerful cognitive enhancements that note-taking provides. Too many notes and your reading speed slows to a crawl.
What should you do?
How to Take Notes While Reading
I'd like to explicate my thinking process of taking notes while reading. Follow these steps and you tin can find the right manner to have notes for your situation.
Step 1: Why am I Reading?
The starting point of any note-taking technique has to be the purpose of whatever yous're trying to read. Why are you reading it in the outset place? Why are you trying to take notes? What are you hoping to achieve?
These questions affair profoundly, because different purposes are amend served by different methods.
Consider two different situations. In one, you lot're studying from a textbook. You want to accept notes because the textbook is also long to easily review, and you want to prepare for an upcoming test based on the material information technology contains.
In the second situation, you're a announcer, doing research to write a piece. You'll become back to your sources when you write the final article, then your goal with taking notes is to make this job easier on yourself afterward.
In my experience, these 2 situations suggest dissimilar note-taking techniques, which I'll go into shortly.
Before that, starting time by asking yourself why you are reading what you're reading. In particular, ask yourself:
- What am I trying to remember? (Alternatively: What do I think I'm going to forget?)
- How am I going to use this information? (e.grand. on a examination, cited in an essay, equally groundwork for deeper thinking, etc.)
- What exercise I plan to do with the notes later on? Will you be studying off of them extensively? Keeping them in your records, only in example, but otherwise not looking at them again? Or possibly y'all're just taking notes to stay focused, and it's highly unlikely you'll wait through them after?
Recollect about your answers to these questions as we go through the adjacent steps.
Step Two: Facilitating Focus
The kickoff purpose of notes should exist to heighten your concentration on what you lot read. This is especially truthful when taking notes from written material, because, in most cases, you'll be able to go back and read the original source in case your notes were incomplete.
You want your notes to do the following:
- Brand it easier for you to concentrate on reading. A small amount of notation-taking can prevent your mind from wandering.
- Focus your heed on the right level of information. Are you trying to meticulously store details from a text? Or are you trying to get the gist of the argument put along past the author? How you accept notes also reinforces what you pay attention to.
- Create a document that you lot can reference later to review, written report or detect information. Notes can likewise serve as a crook-sheet for finding things y'all afterward forgot.
A few strategies I do to take notes while reading that helps with this are:
- Jot notes in the margin. These aren't particularly searchable (if the book is text, not Kindle), but they allow me to reiterate the main idea, so I tin can convince myself I understood it.
- Keep a modest notepad on the side, take breaks each section to jot downwards the principal ideas. This, again, helps strength me to focus on what are the higher-level ideas.
- Creating flashcards. In the rarer situations where memorization of details is important, then a simple strategy tin be to just create flashcards while you take notes. If I'm learning a language, anatomy or am given long lists of details I need to master, this can be better than trying to write them down and transfer them to flashcards after.
The important thing to proceed in heed is that text, unlike live lectures, is usually searchable later. So your notes, to exist constructive, should strive to enhance your focus first, and only secondarily, exist a document that is pretty and easy to review.
Step 3: Review or Call back?
If you lot expect to have to study the same material multiple times to fully master it (say it'southward for an exam) and then, you can salvage time by integrating your annotation-taking and retrieval practice efforts.
Retrieval practice is a well-supported practise that greatly enhances your memory compared to simple review. This technique is simply to try to recall equally much equally you tin can from the text, either past having prompted questions and answers, or just writing every bit much as you can on a blank page.
Retrieval works far better than review, where you await at the notes you lot wrote down multiple times. This is because review merely aids recognition, which isn't very useful for most practical applications. Retrieval, in contrast, practices your ability to summon upwardly memories when you demand them—exactly the ability you lot need for tests and real-life situations.
Therefore, if y'all expect to study the material multiple times, it may be in your benefit to employ the Question Book Method. This method merely encourages you to take your notes every bit questions, rather than as statements. And then, when y'all review your notes, you can reply those questions instead of just reading the information—aiding retrieval and making your studying time more efficient.
Side note: 1 trap students can fall into when using this method is copying down a bunch of irrelevant details as questions, and missing the big moving picture. A expert way to avoid this is to limit yourself to ane or 2 questions per section, thus forcing you to restate the principal idea. If you actually do accept to memorize the details, flashcards with spaced repetition, is a ameliorate tool.
Step Four: Creating Clues for Time to come Searches
Sometimes the goal of notes isn't to facilitate your retentiveness, inside your brain, at all. Rather, the goal is to create an easily-searchable document that can help you find things you thought were important later.
I use this with writing all the time. I have notes, non so much to help me pay attention or memorize the facts, simply to serve as anchors to discover after if I'm looking for a quote, factoid or reference.
Digital notation-taking systems like Evernote, brand this easiest. Although, even the unproblematic note-taking features on Kindle can work quite well. If I know I'm reading a biography and I need examples of the person doing something specific, I might highlight and tag any of those examples with a keyword so a elementary search will bring up all the relevant passages.
Similarly, if yous're reading something you programme to use for a specific purpose, you tin fifty-fifty put lilliputian sticky tags on the volume to mark passages that refer to that. Say you lot're reading a book on marketing, but you're more often than not interested in pulling ideas to try for your own business. You could put these tags on the book so you can hands flip through later if y'all need inspiration.
Final Question: Paper or Digital?
A question many students ask me is whether they should take paper or digital notes.
For classes where my goal is to study, I tend to prefer paper. There are studies supporting the use of paper versus computer notation-taking, although the reasoning behind this might be that it's harder to re-create notes verbatim on newspaper, then you lot're forced to think nearly the data while taking notes. Provided you lot aren't taking verbatim notes, and then, whichever option is the virtually convenient for you.
For texts where my goals is to reference after, I tend to adopt digital. Searching digital documents is much, much easier than printed ones.
The truth is, nevertheless, if you follow the higher up steps, you can observe the right answer for your situation based on what makes y'all feel the most comfortable.
Quick Summary of How to Have Notes While Reading
Hither's a quick summary of what to practise in order to take notes while reading:
- Effigy out your purpose.
- Choose a technique that maximizes your focus on what is about relevant for your purpose. There's many different ones (jotting in the margin, separate notes on paper, Question Book Method) for different purposes.
- Decide whether to optimize for review or retrieval do. For docs yous don't plan to extensively study, review is the obvious choice. For texts you need to master perfectly, the Question Book Method (for large idea) or flashcards (for details) saves time.
- If you exercise need to go back into the text again and again, create clues in your notes that tin help you notice what you're looking for faster.
In a higher place all, however, option a method that you feel most comfy with. The multifariousness of different ways to take notes be because in that location are many unlike reasons you desire to read something and remember it. Experiment with them until yous observe the way that works best for yous!
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Source: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/29/take-notes-while-reading/
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