Notetaking is a versatile skill. Perhaps you take notes during lectures in class, or as part of your job, or when you’re reading an insightful book, or when you have an important meeting. If you’re a notetaker, in any case, you want your notes to be as useful as they can be. And that starts with thinking about their function. Since taking notes is such a common activity, it’s easy to overlook the question of what notes are actually doing for us.

Many people assume that just by writing information down, they are doing something useful. But the cognitive processes involved in taking notes and the way you take them can make a big difference in terms of what you ultimately get out of them.

Taking notes to learn

There are two broad goals of notetaking: recording and learning. The first is when you try to take down as much information as you can so that you don’t miss anything and can review it later. This might be necessary sometimes – for instance, if you are going to be tested on the information presented in a lecture, and you won’t have a recording, text, or slides to refer back to later. Similarly, if you are in charge of meeting minutes or want to do more research on what you’re hearing from your doctor, you may need to simply record as much information as possible.

But in many situations, the most effective and efficient way to take notes is to treat them as a tool for learning: that is, to use them to help you retain and understand the information by putting it down in your own words and organising your thoughts about it. This is the kind of notetaking that I’ll focus on in this Guide.

What do good notes look like, and how can you get better at notetaking? There is not one right answer to these questions, but knowing a bit about how and when notetaking is effective will help you to decide what kind of notes to take when, and what to do with them afterward. As a cognitive psychologist and director of learning services at a medical school, I have a lot of experience with the most effective strategies for notetaking and why they work. Below, I’ll explain how to use some of these strategies and the reasoning behind them.

Use paper if possible

You may have heard before that taking notes by hand, on paper, is better than typing them on a laptop. There is truth to this, but it is due to more than just the effect of handwriting. Writing on paper can be more effective because it is much slower than typing. It’s difficult to write down every word or detail, requiring you to decide what the most important pieces of information are before putting them on paper. When you do this, you’re engaging in a type of mental processing that leads to better learning. Taking notes on paper also allows you to easily jump back and forth between different concepts and to organise them visually (using a diagram, for example).

These things can be done electronically, but most people find that it’s clunkier. If you must use a device, my recommendation is to not simply copy what you hear or read verbatim, but rather to prioritise what seem to be the most important points, and to ensure you process the information by doing some of the things I’ll describe next.

Experiment with ways of processing

When you’re taking notes to learn, it’s essential to organise the information in your own way and to think about how it relates to other things you know (even examples from your own life). You could make bulleted lists, write summaries in your own words or write questions about the material. Maybe you also want to draw pictures or flow charts, or connect different parts of a lecture with arrows. All these activities involve somehow mentally processing the information, which leads to actual learning rather than just recording.

For example, some of my students will create a high-level outline of the main topics from a lecture; under each heading, they write a summary of the information in their own words once that part of the lecture ends. Other students try to anticipate how they might be quizzed on the material and write practice test questions in their notes.

Here’s an example from outside the classroom – let’s say I’m reading a book about a historical figure and want to better retain the information. How might I start? As I go from chapter to chapter, I could take notes in the margins, or in a separate notebook, about how each part of the book relates to contemporary events, other history that I know, or situations in my own life. I might find certain areas interesting or inspiring and write in my notes about why those things caught my attention. Again, these all involve mentally processing, or what we can call active (vs passive) reading.

Try a structured approach

Coming up with your own way of taking notes may seem like a big challenge. The good news is that there are existing notetaking strategies that can help you with this process. One of the strategies that is supported by research is the Cornell notetaking system, created by the Cornell University education professor Walter Pauk.

In this approach, you separate a page into three parts. On the main part of the page will be your ‘notes’. At the bottom of the page, you include a ‘summary’. In the lefthand margin, you label an area for ‘cues’. Here’s an example:

As you’re taking in the information (eg, in class or during a discussion), you use the ‘notes’ area to keep track of important points and ideas.

Afterward, you fill out the ‘cues’ section, which is primarily used to help guide your study later on, when you go back to review your notes. You might write down questions to help you think about the material that was covered, or prompts related to what is most important. These serve as retrieval cues to help you practise recalling the information later, which is a highly effective learning strategy. It could also be helpful to note in the cues section anything you don’t understand, to clarify what you might have to review further or follow up about. Sometimes, depending on the context, you might be able to fill out the cues section while you’re still taking down your main notes.

Last, you fill out the ‘summary’ section, writing down the big-picture ideas that came out of what you heard or read, in your own words. This allows you to take a step back and think through what all of this means and how it fits with other things you’ve been learning.

What’s great about this notetaking system is that it requires you to process the material in multiple ways. The system is also very adaptable. If, for example, you attend a lecture that’s very dense, you could take verbatim notes first and then take Cornell notes later, based on your initial round of notes. And if you need more space, you can reserve a whole page for the ‘cues’ section and subsequent pages where you put your notes, including a summary at the end.

While the Cornell approach is a reliable technique, there are other structured ways of taking notes that you might want to explore as well. For example, mind-mapping is a strategy in which you put the main idea in the centre of a page and organise related material around it using branching connections. With sketchnoting, you take advantage of the powerful interaction between verbal and visual material by creating notes that involve lots of pictures. And outlining can be an effective strategy because it requires you to consider what is most important and how various pieces of information support each topic. Each of these strategies is evidence-based and they work in different ways to support deeper processing.

Adopt a better review strategy

Once you have your notes, what should you do with them? Hopefully it’s clear by now that processing the information is key, so just rewriting the same notes is mostly a waste of time. When you do that, you don’t really have to think about the notes you’ve taken. However, if you reorganise your notes in some way – such as by summarising them, or creating diagrams, flow charts, or hierarchies – that is likely to be more useful, especially if you had to take verbatim notes at first. For example, after hearing about how the heart works, you could draw a picture with arrows showing the direction of blood flow, or you could create appropriate headings and subheadings to organise the main ideas and supporting facts.

Similarly, just rereading your notes doesn’t require a lot of mental effort. It feels like you’re learning, and you might get better at it over time. But if you’re trying to internalise and retain information for later (for example, if you want to be able to retrieve answers on a test), then the best way to prepare is to practise doing that. Instead of rereading, you could try using your ‘cues’ from the Cornell method to bring as much of the information to mind as you can. Then you can go back to your main ‘notes’ section to see what you missed.

If you’re using a different notetaking strategy, you could write quiz questions based on your notes that you can then answer from memory. Or, you could use your notes to make flashcards. Instead of just copying down the notes onto the cards, try using the front side of the card for questions that you could get someone to ask you, or for different ways of comparing and contrasting the information. For example, you could write: ‘Compare and contrast the upbringings of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.’ This will give you a processing benefit while you’re creating the cards, as well as the retrieval benefit when you use them later.