The short version: Good notes are not a transcript. The goal is to make your brain do the work of deciding what matters, putting it in your own words, and coming back to test yourself later. Write less than you think you should, review soon after, and quiz yourself until you can explain the material without looking. The tool you use, whether pen, keyboard, or an AI transcript, matters far less than whether you are thinking while you use it.

Many online courses are presented in the form of videos. I usually play the videos at 1.5X speed, pausing when necessary to catch up when I am writing furiously. For a long time I rarely re-read my notes afterwards. That strategy works fine in courses that require only a superficial understanding, but for more in-depth learning, another level of effort is needed. I have known for a while that although I have completed hundreds of online courses, I still struggle when I have to think hard and remember difficult material.

Why Take Notes?

Taking notes helps us pick out and remember the important points of a topic. If you are unsure what is most important, on the first run through the video or reading, think about what is being emphasized. What do the introductory and summing-up sentences say? Often there is a summary of the important points at the start or end, sometimes both, which can make your task easier. Taking notes can help you fully understand the material and explain it clearly, which turns out to be the real test of whether you have learned something.

Strategies for Taking More Effective Notes

• Listen and concentrate. Keep your mind on the speaker’s words, not the view out the window or tonight’s dinner. This sounds obvious, but attention is the single biggest lever you have.
• Put it in your own words. The most valuable thing you can do while taking notes is paraphrase, rather than copying what the instructor says word for word. Rephrasing forces you to understand the idea before you can write it down. Copying does not. This is the real reason handwriting has a reputation for helping (more on that below): people who write by hand cannot keep up with a verbatim transcript, so they are forced to summarize, and the summarizing is what helps.
• Develop your own abbreviations for commonly used words, which may be different in different courses. Write down your own glossary for each course. For example, in a geology course you might use C = class, I = igneous, T = time, V = volcano. In a literature course you might use CS = character summary, P = plot, T = theme. Do not forget to use arrows or other symbols to save writing whole words.
• Legible beats neat. Notes do not have to be beautiful, but you do need to be able to read them later. Messy but legible is fine.
• Do not write down things you already know. Those words are wasted effort.
• Take fewer notes. While this seems counter-productive, it actually makes the brain work harder as it sorts out the meaningful points and decides what is worth writing down. Just make sure your notes are not too skimpy. You need enough to reconstruct the subject later.
• Writing beats passive review. Simply listening to lecture videos several times is not as effective as actually writing down key points. The same goes for reading: writing the ideas in your own words does more than highlighting, which can feel more productive than it is.

Pen or Keyboard? What the Research Actually Says Now

For years, the standard advice, including in earlier versions of this article, was simple: always handwrite your notes. That advice rested largely on a famous 2014 study memorably titled The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard, which found that students who wrote notes by hand outperformed those who typed.

The picture has since become more complicated, and it is worth being honest about that. Two later attempts to reproduce that result, in 2020 and 2021, did not consistently find handwriting to be superior for test performance. Researchers now describe the question as unsettled rather than decided.

Meanwhile, newer brain-imaging work from 2024 found that handwriting produces more widespread connectivity across the brain than typing does, which the authors argue creates conditions that favor learning and memory. That study has its own critics, who point out it measured brain activity rather than actual learning, and used an artificial typing setup. So it is suggestive, not the final word.

Where does that leave a practical learner? My take: the pen-versus-keyboard debate matters less than it seems, because it is a proxy for the thing that really counts, which is whether you are processing the material or just transcribing it. Handwriting helps many people because it forces that processing. But a thoughtful typist who paraphrases, and does not simply race to capture every word, is doing the same mental work. Use whichever tool lets you think. If you type, the discipline to write less and rephrase more is what you are really after.

What About AI Note-Takers?

Since I last wrote about this, a whole category of tools has appeared that will happily take notes so you do not have to. Auto-generated transcripts now come built into YouTube, Coursera, and many other platforms. Tools like Otter will transcribe a lecture in real time. And you can paste a transcript into an AI chatbot and ask it to summarize the lecture, pull out key points, or generate practice questions in seconds.

These tools are genuinely useful, and I use some of them. But there is a trap here that goes to the heart of everything above. The entire reason note-taking works is that you do the effortful thinking: deciding what matters, rephrasing it, and organizing it. If you hand that job to an AI, you get a tidy summary and learn almost nothing, because the machine did the part that would have built your memory. A perfect AI summary can leave you knowing less than a messy, hand-scrawled page that you struggled to produce yourself.

So my rule of thumb is to let AI support the effortful work, not replace it:

• Take your own notes first, then use an AI summary to check whether you missed anything important. The comparison itself is a useful review.
• Turn AI into a quizmaster, not a note-taker. Ask it to generate questions from a transcript, then answer them from memory before checking. This preserves the effort that actually teaches you.
• Use transcripts to find, not to skip. A searchable transcript is a wonderful way to relocate a point you half-remember, so you can go back and re-engage with it, rather than a substitute for engaging in the first place.
• Be honest with yourself about when a tool is doing your thinking for you. If it is, you are saving time now and paying for it at exam time.

After Taking Notes

Set aside a few minutes afterwards to read through your notes. If necessary, summarize or rearrange them so they make sense. Some people use the Cornell method described below.

Use this time to really make sure you understand all the material. If you feel lost at this stage, you will need to revisit the lecture, textbook, or other resources, writing down key points again as you go. It may take several attempts before full understanding is reached.

To prepare for exams, ask yourself questions until you can explain both the main points and the lesser points from memory. Explaining the material to someone else is one of the best ways to see how much you have really retained. Try teaching it to a friend, a recording device, your dog, your mirror, or your bed. If you are in a public place and do not want to talk to yourself, try quietly whispering or visualizing the words in your head. How would you explain this to a young child? This sort of reformulating is not only an excellent test of your knowledge, it is also a great way to actually teach someone else.

Some Other Types of Notes

Cornell Notes

Take a sheet of lined paper and rule a noticeable line about five or six lines up from the bottom of the page. The strip below this will be your summary area, which you fill in last. Now rule a vertical line about 5 cm (2 inches) from the left side. The narrow left column is your cue area, and the large area on the right is your note-taking area.

Write brief notes in the large right-hand area as you listen or read, leaving a line between each idea. Afterwards, write one or two cue words or a question per note in the left column. Finally, summarize the whole page in the strip at the bottom. The cues let you cover the notes and quiz yourself, and the summary forces you to distill the lot. Your page is now a ready-made revision tool.

Here’s an example of a finished page:

Mind Mapping

To construct a mind map, turn a large piece of blank paper sideways to give yourself room to spread ideas out. Write the main theme in the centre and draw a ring around it. Major points go inside rings around the central idea as they come up, then minor points connect to each major point. Mind maps can be built as you listen, but they really come into their own when you are planning essays.

Outlining

Rather like mind mapping, but instead of a sideways page with ideas linked together, it is more like a list of the main points with minor points indented below each one.

Some Other Handy Tools

• SQ3R: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. You may have heard of this. Rather than a note-taking method, it is a strategy for improving your reading comprehension, and it pairs well with any of the note styles above.
• Flash cards. Although they are a study aid rather than a note-taking technique, flash cards are helpful when there is a lot to memorize: definitions, symbols, labelled diagrams, or formulae. Put a question on one side and the answer on the other, and try to recall the answer before flipping. They are portable and surprisingly powerful.
• Spaced-repetition apps. Digital flash cards get a boost from spaced repetition, which schedules each card to reappear just as you are about to forget it. Anki is the long-standing free favorite for this, with a large library of shared decks. Many learners now speed up deck-building by asking an AI tool to draft question-and-answer pairs from their notes, though the same caution applies: write or at least review the cards yourself so you are the one doing the thinking and to remove any AI hallucinations.

A Special Case: Dysgraphia

If you have dysgraphia, a specific learning difficulty that affects fine motor skills including handwriting, a laptop may be the best way for you to take notes, and the research above should reassure you that typing is not the handicap it was once made out to be. Whichever way you capture notes, the key is the same: engage your brain and search for the meaning behind the words rather than typing up every word the teacher says.

A Final Thought

My notebook and note-taking app are ready and waiting for my next course. After brushing up on how to take better notes, I plan to put the knowledge to use and improve my results. The tools have changed a lot since I started learning online in 2012. The thing that makes notes work has not: it is still the effort you put in that you get back out.