Throughout your degree you will gain a lot of information from lectures, supervisions, and readings, alongside other less formal learning experiences. You will need to make notes and engage in an active process of recording information. Often you will need to condense content, making it more useful for your purposes. This is the ideal as it's all too easy to write too much or see note making as overwhelming, but it needn't be.
We often take notes a certain way and simply continue doing it that way across contexts and time without thinking about other options and how we might evolve our skills around information management. Remember that while different styles suit different learners, different styles also help us achieve different purposes. Taking and managing notes is a skill you can evolve and make more effective.
Ever look back at your notes and wonder: what was I thinking, what do I mean, why did I write that? That is the key question: why? We make notes to help us remember, to reflect, to understand, to not have to duplicate and effort and to avoid plagiarism.
In this section, we explore what makes good notes and suggest some techniques you could try. There are some really good guides across Cambridge on note making. See this guide from Wolfson, for example. There is also an online course for researchers about publishing, managing data, finding and disseminating research on the Research Skills LibGuide.
The key approach with any note making is to put your notes in your own words, rather than writing what you're hearing or reading verbatim. That way, you're analysing as you go, creating ready-made text that you can put directly into your work. Make your notes work for you straightaway as you go along, rather than something to decipher later when you've less time to make sense of it.
The other thing to remember is to include the source so if you're quoting, paraphrasing or referring to ideas, you know where it's come from. This makes referencing and citations much easier, particularly when you're coming back to it a long time later!
Linear
Linear is the most common form of note making. It can easily become a continuous stream of consciousness, so break it up with headings, underlining and capitalisation. Symbols, abbreviations and bullet points are also popular. Leave space around the notes so you can add in your comments later. You could use brackets and different coloured pens to differentiate between your own thoughts and the work that inspired them.
Structured
The structured approach is most often used for lecture notes. Break your page into columns comprising key points on one side and your own thoughts on the other. For revision and writing up your work, summarise below and remember again to include your sources.
Visual
For the vast majority of people thinking about visual notes, this will be a mind map. There are different kinds of maps, but the mind map is the most popular. In the centre is the main topic and you build up a map of everything related to it around. Using colours, drawings and visual representations, it can be a more immediate way to make notes, while also allowing for space to add your thoughts aferwards.
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