Great tip for students, or note takers.
Have you ever dropped down your notes, but you completely couldn’t read your own writing? Well it happens to me. The Potential Blog spells out 5 quick ways to make your notes more readable. The post has some great points on using color, style of text, brackets, arrow, and of course making sure your handwriting is readable (duh).
Brackets: One of my favourite tricks is the use of square brackets ([ ]). If you get lost, bored or come up with an idea which could win you a Nobel Prize then stick it in square brackets. This works for stuff like “[I’m lost], “[NOTE: reread chapter 4]”, “[See lecture notes for quote]”, “[I don’t get this bit]”. This way your lecture notes will make more sense when you re-read them. This helps to avoid plagiarism too because you can clearly see which are your thoughts and which are others.
I will put the sixth tip onto the list.
6. List
List, or writing in point forms is the format of note taking. Write down only key points. Summarize the meaning into a shorter sentence. Digest and break up different concepts into separate points. Trust me, this format is easier to read.
5 Ways to make lecture notes more readable – [Potential Blog]
Thanks, Chris, helpful post! Here is the comment I left on the potential blog site:
One thing that most people do that never made sense to me is if they are attending a symposium or conference where there are multiple speakers on various topics is they use the same page or the same notebook for each speaker. Once they get home, this notebook becomes clutter, or dead weight because the brain perceives it as miscellaneous, and then it ‘disappears’ from consciousness, because your mind doesn’t know what to do with it, which category to file it under.
Try making a heading for each speaker on the first page of your notes for that session, according to their topic such as “internet marketing” or “search engine optimization”. That way, when you get back to your files you can tear the pages out of the book, staple them together and file them according to subject where they are much more easily retrievable!
Jessica from It’s Not About Your Stuff