Notemaking from reading
- Why make notes?
- What to note
- Noting for different purposes
- How to make notes
- What to do when you don’t understand
Why make notes?
While you are at university, you will read a wide assortment of books, journal articles, reports, manuals, information booklets and material from the Internet for many different purposes. For much of your reading you will find it useful to make notes as a permanent record of what you have read so that you can revisit your notes for assignments or revision for an exam.
You need to be really clear about why you are making notes and what you will use them for. What do you want to get from your notes? How much, and just what, you note will be very much determined by your purpose.
Some purposes for noting include:
- getting the main point the author is making
- forming an overview of the main ideas and how they are organised and supported
- finding a specific piece of information or the answer to a particular question
- gaining background information on a certain topic
- gathering information for something you need to produce: a presentation, essay, report
- studying for an exam
- trying to better understand some concept that you are struggling with or need to know more about.
All these different purposes will require slightly different forms of notemaking so think about your purpose before you begin making notes.
What to note
Bibliographic details
At university, you always have to acknowledge where you get information and ideas from. So, to keep an accurate record, it's important to get into the habit of noting the bibliographic details of the resource you are reading. This includes information like author(s); date of publication; title (of book, article, journal); publisher, volume, number and pages of journal article, URL of online resource, and medium (e.g. audio, video, CD-ROM).
You may want to use what you are noting as a reference for an assignment. Having the bibliographic details saves backtracking to identify sources.
Noting for a different purposes
Summarising
If you want to summarise an article, chapter or whatever, structure your notes so that they match the structure of what you are reading. Use the same headings and sub-headings and then record as much detail as you need for your purpose.
Ask yourself first ‘What is the main point the author is trying to make?’. Then, for each of the headings, either turn the heading into a question and note the answer to that question or consider for each heading and sub-heading ‘What is the author saying about this point?’.
If you need to include more detail, consider for each paragraph ‘What point is being made in this paragraph?’. Finally, if you require more still, ask yourself ‘What further information has the author provided in relation to this point? What evidence? What explanation? What examples?’.
Notemaking for your writing or speaking
If you want to gather notes for your own assignment writing or speaking, it is probably better to structure your notes according to the structure of what you are going to produce. Look at the plan of your essay or presentation. What information do you need, what questions do you need to find the answers to in order to complete the assignment? To avoid wasting time on notes you don't need - many students spend a great deal of time recording copious notes that they end up not using - be really clear about what you need to find out and record that and no more. You may find it helpful to make notes for each section on a separate piece of paper with an appropriate heading to help you keep the information sorted.
Notemaking for general information or exam preparation
If you want to supplement your lecture notes or make notes for exams, think carefully about want to find out and only note as much as you need to in order to have a good understanding. For exams, look at your Course Information, lecture notes and past exam questions to help you choose the amount and depth of detail you need.
How to make notes
Distinguishing between quotes and other notes
Sometimes when you are making notes you paraphrase and other times you quote the exact words from the reading. Make sure that you distinguish between direct quotes and ideas, summaries or outlines - specially when you are making notes for assignments. One way of doing this is to always put quotation marks around sections that you copy directly from the text and make a note of the author, date and page number. This will help you avoid plagiarism.
Forms of notes
You should use whatever system of note making that is most meaningful and useful for you. You could write your own summary of the book or article using headings and sub-headings from the reading to help you. Or, you could structure your notes as a table, chart, diagram, branching tree, star, boxes or spokes. Sometimes you might add colour, symbols or arrows to emphasise relationships between items in your notes. You'll find different structures of notes suit different structures of ideas.
You could decide to mark or write on your own copy of the book or article itself. Or, you may choose to use a highlighter to mark key points. Another useful technique is to summarise ideas or write questions or your responses to what you are reading in the margin.
What to do when you don’t understand
Sometimes the readings can be hard to understand, specially when you are still early in the course. You will find that it becomes easier once your knowledge and understanding grow as you get further into the course and the concepts and vocabulary become more familiar to you.
It is hardly ever necessary to understand every word in anything you are reading. What to do about it is determined by your purpose in reading. It might help to try the following strategies:
- even though you don’t understand every word, see if you can get the main point(s) the author is making
- focus on key sections—introduction, conclusion, topic sentences
- if you are unfamiliar with specialised words to do with the topic, make a list of frequently-occurring words and try to find their meaning elsewhere (eg in a subject dictionary)
- if the problem words are not specialist words but just unfamiliar language, substitute words that would make sense
- compile a list of questions to find the answers to elsewhere: other students, lecturers; a simpler text on the same topic
Sources
Marshall, L & Rowland, M 1999 , ‘ Reading’, Ch.8 in A Guide to learning independently Longman, Melbourne.
Northedge, A. 1990 ‘ Reading and Note-taking’. Ch.2 in The Good Study Guide Open University, Milton Keynes.
Taylor, G. 1992 ‘Interpretation: reading and taking notes’. Ch. 3 in The student’s writing guide: for the Arts and Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.