by Juan Leer

Created on: February 02, 2007   Last Updated: September 25, 2009

Whether you are in school or go to a lot of business meetings, you have to be able to take good notes. The speaker is not going to wait for you to write everything down word for word, so it is important that you can effectively write down the key points of what they are saying. How can you do this? You have to find out what works best for you. There is no right or wrong method for more effective note-taking, it all depends on the person. Here are some ways:

- Write down the key points from the lectures. This is probably the most common... write down what you think is important. The hard part is differentiating between what is important and what is not important. If you write down a lot but you miss the important stuff, then you pretty much did all of your note-taking in vain.

- Listen in class, take notes from the book. For more auditory learners that can just digest the lectures, and then maybe hit on whatever key points the teacher went over by reading the book and taking notes from that.

- Print out notes beforehand and just follow along. Obviously this depends on whether a note a teacher posts notes online or not, but if they do this is a very good method. This way you can also jot down notes on the slides if the teacher says any key things that are not on the posted notes.

- Tape the lecture, take notes from that. Hey, maybe some really hard-core people do this. Or, if you miss class, some classes do tape or make podcasts of the lectures. This would be great to take notes from (even if you were in class).

- Try to write down everything the teacher says. Your hand will hurt a lot and you won't really digest any of the information, but if you can get the majority of the stuff down then you can just review it all later. I wouldn't recommend this, but if you write fast enough and don't trust yourself to be able to get the key notes, then this is something that you can try.

Anyway, these are just a few strategies to try to make your note-taking more effective... but the biggest thing is just to try different methods and see what works for you, because it's going to be a little bit different for everyone.

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