How To Take Lecture Notes

Summary: Managing yourself means more than keeping up good personal hygiene, although we certainly hope that ranks right up there on your list of priorities! No, what we mean by managing yourself is staying on the ball. Having a pretty good idea of where you're headed and what you need to do to get there. In this case, where you're headed is easy; you're headed to the end of the semester. After that, you're headed to the end of the year, and eventually, to your college degree. Now,...

Managing yourself means more than keeping up good personal hygiene, although we certainly hope that ranks right up there on your list of priorities! No, what we mean by managing yourself is staying on the ball. Having a pretty good idea of where you're headed and what you need to do to get there. In this case, where you're headed is easy; you're headed to the end of the semester. After that, you're headed to the end of the year, and eventually, to your college degree. Now, what do you need to do to get there? Well, you need to know what papers, assigned reading, and tests will be looming on the immediate horizon so you can be ready for them. You need to have-or brush up on-certain skills to do this work. You need to know where and how to get information and help, and you need to know a couple of basic academic ground rules. Taking Good Lecture Notes Better nail down this skill right away, if you don't already have it, because you're going to need it soon. Picture this: You're studying for a test, anxious and kind of mad at yourself because you waited until the night before-again-after you vowed to change your procrastinating ways. You open your notebook and, for the first time, really look at your lecture notes. Something awful begins to dawn on you: "My God," you say out loud, "these are pitiful!" A split-second later, the grim realization hits: "Oh, no, I'm going to flunk!" Then, assuming it's not too late, you start feverishly racking your brains, desperately trying to remember the name of that girl who sat next to you-yeah, yeah, you know, Nick's friend, the one from Kansas whose oldest sister knew your brother when he was in college. Maybe she took better notes, you tell yourself in a panic. Forget it. You're doomed. There's an obvious, easy way to avoid this nightmare: Take good notes. You can't escape the lecture. You can't get around it; the lecture is still the most common form of instruction in college. It's a fact of your life right now-as inevitable, perhaps, as the need for Oxy 5 and caffeine. The typical college student will sit through literally hundreds of hours of lectures during an undergraduate career. Most students actually stay awake throughout these lectures; many even listen hard and try to learn. And yet, only a relative few ever develop an adequate system for taking good lecture notes. Meanwhile, the many students who take terrible notes wonder why they don't do better on exams. Fact: Good note-taking is essential to good academic progress Of course, there's no one perfect system for taking good lecture notes, and nearly everybody develops some personal code of abbreviations, patterns, and outline forms. Nevertheless, there are some general guidelines that can help you get the most out of those long lectures and make your note-taking more productive.