How to Write Down and Remember Everything Your Teacher Says

As a student, I can almost bet at one time or another you have had the experience of taking reams of notes, only to find you’ve left something important out or simply cannot find it in your notes later. Fortunately for you, there are some helpful tips in this article to help you remember everything your teacher says. Read on for some techniques sure to increase your ability to absorb and recall massive amounts of information, easily and effortlessly.

Use Coloured Pens and Pencils

Take out some of your notes right now. What is the same throughout all of them? The pen and pencil colour. When something is one dimensional like this on an entire page, it is hard to take away certain notes from each area. Instead, try using coloured pens and pencils with which to take notes. Remember, make this a routine and positive results will soon follow.

The majority of people have an easier time locating, learning and recalling information when they have visual cues. Using varied colors in your notes gives you a visual cue which can help you remember or at least find important facts in your notes. Experiment with these - some people find some colors more helpful than others. Different colors for different kinds of notes can also be useful.

I like to write the body of my text in a colour other than blue, usually black, with non-black highlights. I always correct it in red if necessary. This is due to the extreme contrast that black and red represent to one another. You’ll end up being able to find it much easier on your pages cluttered with notes.

Underline and ACCENTUATE Key Points

This is very important when taking notes. Be creative and explore different variations. Multi-stroke, underlining, boxes, circles, and shadows are effective in drawing attention to increasingly important items or definitions. Just be sure not to overdue it or these styles will be ineffective.

Include Charts, Figures and Graphs

Sometimes things just can’t be communicated clearly using only words. Relationships, timelines, causality and exchanges are difficult to explain in writing. However, they are easy to illustrate even for the artistically challenged like me! These diagrams should include colours and other graphical representations such as bullets, arrows, shading and text of different colours.

Summarize Notes On Large Paper

For some reason, large sized paper works really well for note taking. You can get continuous computer paper in boxes of 5,000 sheets for as little as $25, making this a great investment - I’ve been using the same box for two years now! You can even do large diagrams and charts and simply fold them up for easy portability.

The advantage of large sheets like these is being able to fit your notes from a lecture onto one sheet of paper. Alternatively, the sheets can be divided by subject or concept. One or the other strategy may be better, depending on the course.

To illustrate, I had a course last year where I was able to place my notes from lectures on a single page (one page per lecture). I could fit notes for 17 textbook chapters and thirty articles on these pages as well. This let me study from 12 pages instead of a thousand - quite a time saver, and MUCH more effective.

Taking notes can actually be fun. The best part is, when you take notes using these strategies, you can feel yourself remembering the information! Try it yourself - you’ll find your confidence in your academic abilities grows by leaps and bounds and your grades are sure to reflect this.