If you’re prepping for exams, you don’t need it! But if you like it, that’s okay! Do it! But please don’t spend time trying to learn from scratch at the beginning of Year 11. (I guess if you’re still in Year 10, you have some buffer to learn it...)
I know I know, it looks beautiful and elegant and magnificent. It makes your notes look gorgeous. It looks so sophisticated and classy. Trust me, I’ve been there.
This post isn’t just about calligraphy I guess. It’s about making your notes pretty in general.
If you do like to make your notes look very pretty and decorate them, then I have no power to stop you - you do you! But if you’re thinking about starting it in Year 11, then I’d advise you to not.Â
My notes were mostly bullet points and diagrams that I made up myself. I didn’t even underline the damn title. Still got me 9s.
You don’t need to spent a fortune on Amazon for beautiful stationery from every corner of the world. But it is vital to stay organised. So when you see all these studyblrs and study youtubers posting god-like notes, there’s definitely something to take away. Although I’m not a fan of making decorative, stylish notes with handwriting that could literally be a font on its own, here’s some stuff I took away:
1. Making your notes neat and orderly can make them soooo useful.
Go all out if you need to. Colour code your work. Highlight that phrase. Underline it. Draw a detailed diagram. Make a picturised mind map. Draw out a storyboard. But don’t just do it idly. Do it in a way that helps you personally. For example I remembered the Lord Of The Flies chapters by their numbers. But someone else might prefer to draw out each title to give them an idea of what goes on in it.
I picked this up pretty inherently, and then learnt about it in Graphics as well.Â
Like right now, I’ve used a coloured, all-caps font for the title of the post. Then my subtitle is bold. And now I’ve highlighted some numbered points. Use this in your notes too! E.g, make the title of the topic/lesson in all caps/highlight it. Underlining just doesn’t seem to make it stand out for me, but you do you. For subtitles, maybe you could underline them, and then indent whatever comes below. If you need to make a subpoint, draw a right-angled arrow and indent. Take some tips from your fav word processor.
3. Don’t just write out what you see
Like my favourite geography teacher from Year 7- 9 said, ‘write it in your own words’. Not only that, but write it in your own way. Yeah, you might see a block of text in your book and you think about shortening it. But there are other ways to summarise.
Draw a diagram. If the text describes a process, draw a flowchart or a visual equation. It it describes a cycle, guess what - draw a cycle. You don’t even need to draw (come on, we can’t all be artists). Just write a phrase. If the phrase is too long, why don’t you split it up into two phrases? Doodle above important words!
Motivate yourself to look back at these notes! If it means using calligraphy, highlighters, cute banners, decorate borders, arrows and whatnot, by all means, do it!
I genuinely don’t have anything against people who do make their notes look wonderful (like y’all are talented legends and i could never match that lol). But don’t feel like you have to do all this right now. After your exams you can literally do whatever you want. But don’t jeopardise your exams if you feel like you will.
My main advice is to make notes that will motivate the hell out of you. Some people like to type them up. Some like to sketch them digitally. Some like to use plain paper, some use graph paper, some use file paper.Â
If you really want to master calligraphy, first of all, do it, but second of all, don’t waste valuable time doing it if you're going into Year 11 right now.