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Note Making

  • Note-Making v Note-Taking
  • Note-Making Techniques

Whilst studying for professional qualification, most students create copious amounts of notes, whether from the textbooks, revision courses, or from a lecturer at a Revision Course run by the the Institute Academy. These notes are a valuable resource for your learning and they will build up quickly during your studies. 

They can help you to record and map what you are learning and then to recall and understand it later. You may well depend upon your notes for your revision, as well as for any coursework assignments. It is important, therefore, to develop efficient and effective skills for creating notes. 

Note-Making v Note-Taking
The difference between note-making and note-taking is substantial and could mean the difference between a pass and a credit pass or indeed a pass and a fail. 

Note-taking involves:

  • Writing down most of what you hear or read without actually processing the information
  • Notes usually being copied from the original source and re-written in a similar format
  • Notes being taken that are often unselective, trying to cover most or all of the information without highlighting the main points or issues.

Taking notes can be useful for study, but it is a passive approach to study and learning – this starkly contrasts with the more active approach known as note-making. 

Note-Making
Note-making is a more intellectual task than note-taking as it involves selecting, analysing and summarising what you hear or read. It also involves being able to strike a balance between listening / reading actively and making a record of it. Note-making is therefore an active approach to study as it:

  • Forces you to think, because you have to make decisions about what to write
  • Helps you to pay attention to what you are reading, or listening to
  • Assists your understanding of new material if the notes are organised in your own way and in your own words
  • Helps you to concentrate
  • Helps you to remember more information
  • Makes it easier to distinguish between important issues and detail
  • Provides a permanent record.
  • Facilitates learning; lectures or books can become clearer later upon reflection and reviewing of your notes.

Note-Making Techniques
Anyone can make notes, but it is difficult to make good, concise, brief, accurate notes that may both reflect and comment on the nature of the information you are referring to and which you can use and understand at a later date. There are, however, a number of techniques that you can use for making effective notes.

Sequential / Linear Note-Making
This traditional approach typically involves making notes in the form of lists or phrases. Notes of this type can be made for different purposes and can include more or less detail, as required, or to highlight points. The main features of good sequential notes are:

  • Key words and phrases
  • Headings
  • Sub-headings
  • Conciseness
  • Underlined or highlighted key points
  • Margins or written on every other line to allow space for comments or future additional notes
  • Inclusion of diagrams, flow charts and colours (if appropriate)
  • Suitable layout

The following is an example of sequential note-making from the Introduction to Financial Services textbook which is studied at the Certificate / Diploma level.

Defining Money (The Theory)

  • Exchange Function
  • Primary function
  • Frees trade from barter constraints
  • Asset Function
  • People must be prepared to accept / hold it
  • Must hold its value
  • Must be held without cost
  • Must be readily available as a medium of exchange

The notes are clear and eye-catching and notice the amount of white space on the page – this allows the eye to see a pattern that the brain then finds easier to store in its long-term memory. The use of key ideas or words is crucial to sequential note-making. It is therefore important that you choose these carefully at the outset before compiling your notes.

Any budding artists may find that your patterns are helped by cartoons and drawings to illustrate your ideas – pictures are more easily memorised than words.

Pattern Note-Making / Mind-Mapping
This technique is a more visual method of note-making than a linear approach. This approach uses arrows and circles to connect key words/phrases and should lead to the creation of a spreading pattern in all directions, rather than just words which start at the top of the page and work down. 

In 1979, Tony Buzan advocated that we need to make more use of note-making forms that use the right side of our brain. The left side of the brain works in a linear way; it deals with lists and sequences. On the other hand, the right side builds and stores images and patterns. 

Buzan introduced the concept of mind-mapping which involves making notes with patterns and by using images. Buzan believes that these images and patterns can be important aspects of our learning processes and provide effective routes to understanding. 

The main features of pattern note-making / mind-mapping include:

  • Starting with a central heading / concept in the centre of the page
  • Noting key words, ideas and / or concepts which surround the central idea / concept
  • Heading and subheadings highlighted with boxes / circles
  • Underlined or highlighted key points
  • Conciseness
  • Use of symbols, images and colour as necessary
  • Arrows / lines ('branches') to link key words, ideas and / or concepts and to show developments / process e.g. 'this leads to ...' - these branches should radiate from the central topic / idea
  • Semi-structured layout using a page sideways (landscape), and the notes are restricted to this page

f you haven't tried mind-mapping before, why not practice with an idea / topic which is not related to your studies? Choose something which you know a lot about or are very interested in, e.g. your hobby or special interest. Once you have done this, keep developing and practising your mind-mapping techniques until you can use this form of note-making for your studies.

Using Shorthand or Abbreviations to Aid Note-Making
If you are lucky, you may be trained in both writing and reading official shorthand languages – the majority of us are not quite so fortunate! This does not stop you developing your own shorthand language for note-making. The most important thing is to be able to read them again later and make sense of them. It is easy to forget what you meant when you first used the abbreviation. 

Abbreviating may be particularly useful when making notes from speech, such as at a CIOBS Academy Revision Course where time is of the essence.

Using Diagrams
The use of diagrams will not only make your notes much easier to read and more presentable but will also help you to memorise the subject material. 

Using Mnemonics and Groupings
From early schooldays most of us developed the use of mnemonics as a memory aid. Remember learning the key scales in music? E G B D F. Teachers told us to remember instead, Every Good Boy Deserves Football (or Favour). Even tone deaf and musically illiterate students remember this mnemonic many years later! 

During your studies you should be able to develop a number of mnemonics to help you remember facts about the topic. A good example from Sales and Service is a mnemonic to remember the principle of giving information to customers - KISS or  

  • K Keep
  • I It
  • S Short and
  • S Simple

Alternatively you may wish to group ideas as a way of remembering them more efficiently. Marketing provides an excellent example of grouping. A product's marketing mix is often described as the 4P's, or


P Produce
P Price
P Promotion
P Place

Highlighting, Annotating and Underlining
Underlining involves drawing lines under the print with a pen, or (coloured) pencil. Highlighting involves covering the print by using light-coloured felt markers or highlighting pens. Annotating involves making brief notes in the margins of the page in order to explain or comment upon the material. These note-making techniques can allow you to pick up the meaning of the text when you come back to it at a later date. 

Underlining, highlighting and annotations are a valuable way of focusing your attention on the text and making you pick out and think about the main ideas. They also force you to leave a trace on the page of the sense you have made of the text.

Use these methods as long as this is not where your note-making ends otherwise you may end up with most of the page coloured in fluorescent yellow or pink and covered in a scrawl of notes! If you tend to cover most of the text with highlighter, it may be wise not to have a pen in your hand for the first reading. If you decide to highlight the reading material, consider making notes in a separate notebook or index cards rather than on the text itself. This is because a textbook is a cumbersome place in which to store notes. Given that you will be using more than one source for any assignments, it would be difficult and impractical to carry around your all notes.

Avoid trying to write first drafts of assignments from highlighted or underlined notes. It is usually necessary to take written notes as well – just highlighting parts of a photocopy from an article or book is not enough. By summarising the relevant parts of what you have read you will begin to understand and remember the material.

Summarising
Bringing together notes you have already made to make a new, condensed version can be useful. This is called summarising. Summarising the material in your own words will actually save you time, since once you put the information in your own words you won't need to waste time working out the meaning of a passage you have highlighted, every time you re-read it. 

Putting the notes into your own words also means that you are not likely to commit plagiarism (using others' work and representing it as your own). 

Storing your Notes
Having spent a considerable amount of time making notes from various sources, it's worth spending a little more time developing your own system of organising them. This will save you time in the long run as you won't have to waste time searching for notes you made some months ago. Consider some of the following tips for storing and organising your notes:

  • Keep all notes on the same subject or topic (Academy lecture notes, photocopied articles etc.) together
  • Use colour coded files, one for each subject and use dividers / tabs to divide into sections
  • Number the pages and create an index or contents page in your storage file
  • Above all, keep the storage system simple – if it takes a long time to negotiate your system, it is probably too complicated
  • If you are using a computer to record your notes (or do your assignments!), remember to always back-up your work – keep a copy on a floppy disk, or a recordable CD (CDRW or CDR)

More Tips for Making Effective Notes
Developing your note making techniques will mean that you don't need to waste time re-writing them.

  • Always review your notes – fill in gaps, sort out misunderstandings, and make summaries of topics to enhance your understanding of the material.
  •  Making notes means that you do not have to write fully articulated sentences – they must however be in your own words and clear enough for you to be able to read them when you come back to them.
  • Don't simply copy out of workbooks – put the notes into your own words. To be able to do this, you will have to ensure full understanding of the topic. This understanding makes for effective learning.
  • Although you can transcribe direct quotations from the text, you should keep these fairly rare – only where you feel a quotation is particularly apt, or where it expresses an idea so clearly that you could not put it better yourself, even in note form, should you quote verbatim.
  • Use lots of space – this will let you add points later and will make it quicker and easier to re-read your notes.

Whichever format you use for note-making, it should allow you to:

  • Review the notes easily
  • Re-read them easily on a regular basis
  • Provide an opportunity to expand upon them
  • Allow ease of filing and recording.

The Chartered Banker programme provides broad, flexible skill sets and a wide range of ways to achieve the qualification.

Philip Grant, Managing Director, UK Private Banking at Lloyds Banking Group