This Is How You Actually Take Notes In College, Bitches
it’s occurred to me that nobody fuckin knows how to take notes in classes and most advice about it is bad. What the fuck are “key words?”
So anyway here’s how I’ve gotten a’s in all my classes in college so far
I’m not gonna bother too much with telling you to take notes in class. Everyone knows that shit. But most people’s note taking skills suck ass and there are two main types of sucking ass I have observed
The first is the one where your notes look like a list of key terms and words. Sometimes they are underlined or there are dashes that connect them to other words. So if your prof was talking about Henry VIII you’d write down something like
Church of England—divorce
DON’T DO THAT. Those words are gonna show up on the test, sure, but writing them down isn’t gonna help you with the test. What the fuck does any of that mean? High school is shit and your “key words” can’t help you now.
Here’s the other type of bad note taking:
It was necessary for Henry VIII to have a male heir who could succeed him, but his wife was unable to conceive a son. The Catholic Church
I stopped writing there because your professor moved on to something else. But, tbh, even if you can write fast enough to keep up with the content of the lectures (and you can’t for the entire lecture) it’s not helpful to have a solid wall of Everything That Was Covered In The Lecture, in grammatically correct complete sentences. Are you gonna read that shit again? No!
And honestly most people have like, sentences here and there that look important instead of the whole lecture. Which is also bad.
So what’s the not shitty way to take notes? It comes down to these principles:
Show Relationships of Things
These kind of go together
I cannot emphasize enough that you don’t need to write sentences like a normal person. Shorthand everything, and I don’t mean some fucked up studying shorthand you just came up with like “AmR” for American Revolution, I mean like...fuckin text/memespeak. Don’t write complete sentences, completely abandon formality. Abbreviate anything you would in a text message, you know what it means.
HOWEVER: You Must Show How Things Are Related To Things
To understand broad concepts you gotta understand how the things in them are related to other things.
That’s why writing down “Henry VIII” and “Church of England” isn’t gonna help you, because you’re not learning that there is a Church of England.
Did Henry VIII burn the Church of England? Cheat on his wife with it? Who knows? Definitely not you.
This is why you have to connect stuff like
Catholic Church says no divorce
Henry VIII—starts Church of England
But ya know you can make that more memorable AND more clearly show how one thing caused the other
Henry VIII: fuk u *church of england*
I’m completely dead serious about this, this kind of slang is very good at indicating exactly how things relate to things in zero time and you know exactly what it means and you’ll remember it
You have to come up with shorthand to quickly indicate how things are related. Say you write down the definitions of two terms for like, opposing theories on government in class. That’s great but you’re leaving it to yourself to work out the opposing part later from what you write, and your brain’s a flaky bitch.
Like part of what you’re doing it giving yourself help with HOW to study your notes later.
So like. Do something like write a jagged line in between the definitions, indicating conflict. Write “OTOH” or “HOWEVER” in between in big fuckin letters. Writing down “Catholic Church” and what that is and “Church of England” and what that is, is fine. But like, if the main theme is the contrast between the two, “Catholic Church HOWEVER Church of England” immediately tells you the basicest basics. It’s like a tiny outline, telling you what to expect. Sure, you can figure it out reading your notes but I’m telling you how to write skimmable notes that you can glean stuff from even when you’re half spaced out and shit, okay?
Same thing for like, dates and sequences and cause-and-effect and stuff. Even if you’ve got the dates down...be sure to put arrows or something so even at a glance you’ve got basically what’s going on.
Also i know it feels like wasting paper but DONT scrunch all your notes together into small space on the paper. That lil dialogue between Henry and the Church of England is spread out over 3 lines which means if you have ADHD like me you can actually fuckin read it. Turn things into bullet lists. Indent things with little arrows to show things leading to things. If there’s a clear move to a new topic, new page. If you’re actually filling up the paper all the way that shits hard to read and it’s even harder to pick out the Big Important Stuff.
Last word of advice: If you end up like writing down two things and can’t tell what they’re for or how they’re related to each other...ASK QUESTIONS. Like “I’m sorry can you explain how the Church of England is related to the Catholic Church? I didn’t quite catch that.” If talking in class makes you feel like you might be percieved badly, you can frame it like a Nerd Question “So, what kind of relationship would you say the Church of England and the Catholic Church had?” or just play it off like you didn’t hear it like “I’m sorry, what was that last thing you said about the Church of England and the Catholic Church?”
Or just make a mark on your notes to remind yourself that you need more info and to go to your prof’s office to ask questions. I would really not be nervous about that, professors normally really like it when students show that they really want to succeed in the class and that they care. Unless they’re like, a complete dickhead, in which case, fuck what they think, right? You’re gonna ask questions and it’s their problem because you’re essentially paying them for your presence in the class.
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