By doing this, we can't hide from what we don't know. The process here is similar to the Feynman technique, which encourages us to identify knowledge gaps by explaining a topic as if we're speaking to a small child. Recitation involves explaining everything we’ve learnt aloud, in as much detail as possible, without looking at our notes. This sounds counter-intuitive, but research shows that this helps our brain to better store and recall that same information in the future. I talk about this more in my article on Active Recall, but the idea is that self-testing makes revision cognitively demanding as we have to try even harder to retrieve the information we want. These questions should be focused on the main ideas that we're learning rather than the nitty-gritty details, because the purpose is to ensure we understand the general arguments/points for each topic. But don't worry if it takes you a day or two to get this step done.Īnother helpful tip is to reduce our notes by creating a bunch of questions that we can test ourselves on later. I find it's best to summarise everything straight after I've learnt it, so the material is still fresh in my mind. At the very least, by condensing our notes we're essentially stripping away any information that isn't 100% essential for us to know.Ī lot of people will skip this crucial step thinking “I won’t forget this stuff” or “I’ll just summarise it later”, but these thoughts just make our lives so much harder when it comes to revising it later. Summarising is a brilliant way of consolidating our understanding of the information, helps us to see where there are gaps in our knowledge, and there’s even some evidence to suggest it strengthens our memory. Once we’ve written our notes, we need to summarise everything into our own words. (If you're typing your notes instead, then you may be interested in my video on 'How I Type Really Fast'). This is one of those seemingly minor note-taking tips that seriously helps when it comes to ramping up our learning speed.
Leave as much white space as possible on the page to increase readability.Use bold headings when moving on to a new point.My advice is to use bullet points wherever possible as this helps to organise the notes coherently and helps us to scan for the most important information. Too much information makes it difficult to learn when we review it at a later date. Preferably, we should use no more than one piece of A4 paper to do this. Whether we’re sat in a lecture, learning from a textbook, or following an online course (like my Part-Time YouTuber Academy), it’s important to have a blank page to write down all the meaningful points and ideas that you hear/read. The most obvious aspect of any note-taking method is that we need somewhere to actually write our notes. Review – we should regularly revisit our notes to ensure maximum retention.Reflect – our notes should be related to other notes we’ve already written.Recite – there needs to be an easy way to test ourselves using our notes.Reduce – there should be somewhere to summarise those notes.Record – there should be somewhere to take our notes (obviously).These essential characteristics are known as the 5 R’s of note taking: Do what works.īut, regardless of our preferred method, a good note taking + learning technique should have some easily identifiable characteristics.
If you’ve already found a technique that works for you, there’s really little point changing things. And to a large extent the ‘correct’ note-taking method is a very personal thing. Summarising, highlighting, and creating mind maps are just a few of the most popular methods.
In short, a good note-taking technique is one that helps us remember, retain, and recall the most amount of information.Ĭlearly, there are a number of different ways we can take notes when learning stuff. The way we take our notes influences how well we learn.
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