How to Write Better and More Efficient Notes | Study Clinic

Main Ideas

• Writing notes is not the same as learning. Creating a full or polished set of notes can feel like progress without ensuring that you understand or can recall the material. Relying too heavily on writing may even interfere with learning.
• Understand the material before choosing a note-taking style. Practise holding information in mind, viewing it from different perspectives, connecting or comparing ideas, and relating new concepts to what you already know.
• Focus on understanding and discovery, not transcription. Learning is easier when new information feels like an example or extension of existing knowledge.
• Use notes to support, not replace, your understanding. Notes should reflect how you have organized the material mentally. A comprehensive, linear page may not be useful if it doesn’t represent how you understand the ideas.
• Practise reconstructing information. You may recognize ideas when prompted but still struggle to recall, organize, and explain them independently. Reconstructing ideas helps turn scattered knowledge into usable understanding.

Suggested Approach

1. Try learning a lecture without taking notes and notice whether your attention or understanding changes.
2. Focus first on understanding and mentally organizing the information.
3. Practise:
   • Recalling and reconstructing ideas without looking at notes.
   • Examining concepts from different perspectives.
   • Identifying meaningful connections and contrasts.
   • Simplifying new material by linking it to prior knowledge.
4. Once the ideas are organized, use notes to supplement and represent your understanding.
5. Judge notes by whether they help you express and use what you know—not by how neat or complete they look.

Speakers and Sources

• Main speaker: The presenter, apparently Justin Sung, discusses learning and note-taking.
• Question or source: An unnamed student or viewer raises a concern at the start: they still take notes as they did in high school and find it time-consuming to write everything down. The subtitles do not identify them by name.