How to Take Notes, Read Better, and Retain It All: Master Your Information, Master Your Learning and Performance

How to Take Notes, Read Better, and Retain It All:

Master Your Information, Master Your Learning and Performance

By Peter Hollins,

Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

< < CLICK HERE for your FREE 14-PAGE MINIBOOK: Human Nature Decoded: 9 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change the Way You Think. > >

--Subconscious Triggers

-- Emotional Intelligence

-- Influencing and Analyzing People

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Note Taking Nuts and Bolts

The Sentence Method

The Charting Method

Get the GIST

Chunking Information

Chapter Two: Thinking in Hierarchies to Get Organized

Mind Mapping

The QEC Method

The 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle

Knowledge Organization with Zettelkasten

Chapter Three: Strengthen Your Reading Comprehension

Effective Highlighting

Active Listening and Note Taking

Top-down Self-questioning for Deeper Comprehension

Reverse outlining for better reading comprehension

Chapter Four: Deeper Comprehension and Lasting Memory

Writing by Hand Increases Memory

Schema Activation in Reading Comprehension

The Art of Observational Note Taking

Overlearning for Subject Mastery

Chapter Five: Master Abstraction, Analysis, and Critical Thinking

Reading Analytically Through Pigeonholing

The Three Level Reading Guide–from Shallow to Deep

The SPE Method for Better Critical Reading

ADEPT Method

Chapter Six: Analyze and Synthesize

Compile a KWL Chart

The REST Method

How to Filter What You Consume

Becoming a Syntopical Reader

Chapter One: Note Taking Nuts and Bolts

What do think of when you hear the phrase, note taking?

You might assume that note taking is a basic skill that simply exists to help people record information. Perhaps you see it as a practical way to aid your memory, taking quick notes so you don’t forget this or that. In the chapters that follow, however, I hope to convince you that the art of note taking is much, much more than this.

While this book is about note taking, it’s also about the magic that happens inside our own brains when we learn, challenge, and interpret information. Well written notes will help you explore and reflect on the complexities of your learning processes, making them essential for clear, powerful, and organized thinking.

Taking high-quality notes is a valuable life skill that’s well worth cultivating. There is plenty of advice out there about various note taking strategies, but our aim is not to just collect a series of tips and tools, but rather to develop our own intellectual powers, so that we are always empowered to use just the right tool, and in just the right way.

Whether you’re a school or university student, someone who wants to improve their writing and reading comprehension, or simply studying for your own edification and development, note taking is a skill that will teach you to learn, and there is no subject in the world it cannot be applied to.

As with anything in life, you get out what you put in. Many of the approaches and techniques covered in this book may appear at first glance to be simple and straightforward, but their power comes in their application. Good note taking is active, responsive, and tailored to our unique goals and needs. It requires patience, consistency, and discretion. The same principle applies to reading this book–the way to make these concepts come alive is to test them out yourself, tailor them, and make them your own.

With each chapter, the techniques and methods we explore will increase in complexity, but with active engagement, so too will your own comprehension and mastery.

Let’s start at the beginning: When you take notes, what are you actually doing? In the most practical sense, how are you using your pen and paper, and precisely what are you writing down?

Most of us have ended up with our own style and approach for taking notes without giving it much thought; we simply turn up to a text or a lecture and start making marks on a page. In this chapter, however, we’ll be looking at some more deliberate forms of note taking. This is not an exhaustive list, but a collection of the most effective practical techniques, and the rationale behind them. We’ll consider their respective pros and cons and their applicability to different areas of study.

The Sentence Method

The sentence method described below helps you clearly separate out–literally–the new ideas, thoughts, and themes you’re taking in. This method is easy, but takes a little practice. It requires us to be slower and more deliberate in the way we listen, and to resist the tendency to race ahead in our own minds.

The idea is to organize and understand while you process new information, and to do so using complete sentences, each spaced on a new line on the page. While best suited to live lectures, this method can also be used to quickly make sense of new readings or to create quick summaries that can then be used later to draft essays of your own.

At first, this method may seem a little tedious or time-consuming, but being deliberate in this way is precisely what makes it so effective. As you carefully prepare incoming data in sentence form, you are also shaping and organizing those ideas into a logical, organized structure.

The method is straightforward:

1.      Identify the broad topic and the main points you’ll be covering

2.      Add details to each of these main points, in the form of full sentences

3.      As you add these details, give each sentence a new line

That’s it. It may sound simple, but you’d be surprised just how often your notes don’t conform to so simple a criterion. Let’s take a closer look using examples to illustrate the process. One example will be fairly basic and the other more complex, to show that although simple, the method works for topics of any kind.

Step 1: Identify broad topic and main points

Let’s say you’re listening to a quick video lecture about the key differences and similarities between viral and bacterial infections. The broad topic is obviously types of infection, and there are two main points to be covered–the characteristics of both bacteria and viruses, and how they compare.

At the top of your page, you would write the topic header types of infection: viral vs bacterial. Then, beneath that, list out the main points: Differences and similarities. This gives you a strong outline for the notes you take throughout the lecture.

You might, on the other hand, have a live lecture about the many consequences of the Reformation on society. The effects of the reformation is clearly the broad topic, but this topic will likely have many different points and sub-points, many of which you don’t yet know about.

In this example, you’d place the header, effects of the Reformation at the top of your page. Then, as the lecture continues you would listen for important main points to add, such as social changes, economic changes, or religious changes when they come up.

Step 2: Add details in the form of full sentences

Now you can expand on each point with concise sentences that cover just one idea each. A good sentence will be clearly connected to the broader topic and will usually state a fact or piece of data, explain a process, summarize, or connect certain ideas.

For our virus and bacteria example, under the main point differences you might list the following sentences:

•      Bacteria can live and replicate on its own, but viruses need a host to replicate.

•      Some bacteria are helpful to humans, whereas there are no beneficial viruses.

•      Viruses are not technically alive, but bacteria are living cellular organisms.

For the Reformation example, you might write:

•      The Protestant emphasis on personal Bible reading led to dramatic increases in literacy. (This could be placed beneath the sub-point of social changes.)

•      The closure of monasteries and restructuring of churches resulted in significant wealth transfer away from the church and to the nobility. (This could fit beneath economic changes.)

•      Challenges to Papal authority had far-reaching consequences for the political and spiritual organization of the church. (This would fit beneath religious changes.)

Step 3: Give each new sentence its own line

As you might have guessed, you will probably be adding sub-sentences and sub-sub-sentences to your growing outline as you listen to the lecture or make your way through the text. This is why it’s important to give yourself plenty of space so that you can expand on your notes as needed. Not only will this give you a little visual clarity, it will also help you understand these ideas relative to one another.

As the lecture on the Reformation unfolds, for example, you might find yourself with this sort of structure:

•      Social changes as a result of the Reformation:

o      The Reformation led to social changes that ultimately laid the foundation for modern democracy.

▪      One social change was the increasing value placed on education.

▪      Another social change was the increasing value placed on personal conscience.

As you can see, the larger and more complex your topic, the greater the likelihood that you will have more nested layers like