How to Take Better Notes: 10 Habits for Class, Reading and Work

Learning how to take better notes has more to do with habits than with page layouts. Preview the reading or slides before class. During class, write ideas in your own words, keep the examples and your questions, leave space, and mark what you didn't follow. Within a day, fill the gaps and turn the notes into questions you answer from memory, then repeat that quiz a few times over the following weeks.

Below are the ten habits in order, with an example and short versions for textbooks and meetings. For page layouts such as Cornell or outline notes, see our guide to note taking methods. We make Ophaya smart pens, and one section covers using one, but every habit here works in a plain notebook.

Before class: two habits that take ten minutes

1. Preview the reading or slides

Skim the assigned reading or posted slides: headings, terms in bold, figures. You aren't trying to learn it yet. You want a rough map, so that in class you can tell a main point from a side comment. The UNC Learning Center also suggests a quick look at your last set of notes.

Turn a heading or two into questions at the top of the page. "Why does too much heat stop an enzyme?" gives you something to listen for.

2. Set up the page before the lecture starts

Write the course, date and topic on the first line, and start each lecture on a fresh page. If you use Cornell notes, rule the lines now. A dated, titled page is what lets you find "the enzymes lecture" three weeks later, just before the midterm.

How to take better notes during class

Most advice on how to take notes stops at "write down the important parts." These five habits make that more concrete.

3. Write in your own words

Copying a slide word for word feels safe, but the words can travel from ear to hand without you deciding what they mean. Put the idea in your own phrasing, even roughly. UNC's guide puts it as noting the main points "rather than copying down the entire presentation." Copy exact wording only for definitions, formulas and anything flagged for the exam.

4. Keep the examples and your own questions

Students often write down the rule and skip the example, and a week later the rule is a string of terms. If the professor works through a case or sketches a graph, get a rough version of it next to the point it illustrates. When something doesn't add up, write the question in the margin where it came up: "if heat speeds reactions up, why does the rate drop?"

5. Leave space

Skip a line between ideas and keep a wide margin. Dartmouth's Academic Skills Center recommends leaving "plenty of white space for later additions." That's where the definition you look up later and the step you missed will go.

6. Use a few abbreviations, the same ones every time

Shorthand only saves time if you can read it next week. Pick a small set and keep it all term, such as "def" for definition, "ex" for example and "Q" for a question to answer later. Abbreviations invented mid-lecture are the risky ones: "act. E" might mean activation energy today and nothing by the exam. Dartmouth suggests a key at the top of the page. We'd write one inside the front cover.

7. Mark what you didn't understand

Two kinds of gaps show up in lecture notes, and they need different fixes. Sometimes the professor moved on before you finished writing. We'd leave a gap and write "missed," since the slides or a classmate can fill it. Sometimes you heard it but didn't follow it. Put a "?" in the margin for that, because it usually needs a question in office hours. Either way, mark the spot and keep listening.

A before-and-after example

Here is a made-up example: a few minutes of an intro biology lecture on enzymes, written two ways. The left column is a typical rushed page. The right column uses the habits above, plus ten minutes of cleanup that evening.

The rewrite holds far more. The idea is in plain words, the graph is sketched, the gap says what to do about it, and the last line is a question to be quizzed on next week. By the midterm, "induced fit" and "act. E" in the rushed version will mean very little.

After class: review, test yourself, repeat

8. Review within a day and fill the gaps

UNC suggests going back to your notes "a day or so after class" to check that they make sense and catch what you missed. Dartmouth says to "fill in gaps you remember but didn't record." This is when your "missed" and "?" marks get dealt with.

The usual reason to review so soon is the forgetting curve Hermann Ebbinghaus measured on himself in the 1880s. In 2015, Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated his experiment in PLOS ONE, with Dros relearning lists of nonsense syllables after delays from 20 minutes to 31 days. Forgetting was fastest at first and slowed over time, much as Ebbinghaus found. That is one person and meaningless syllables, so it can't say how much of a lecture you will lose. We still read it as a reason not to save the first review for the weekend.

9. Turn your notes into questions and answer them from memory

Rereading is how most students review, and it is a weak option. In a 2013 review of ten study techniques in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, John Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing as one of only two techniques with high utility, and rated rereading low. In a summary for teachers, Dunlosky suggests writing answers down and continuing until you recall each one correctly at least once.

With notes, that means writing a question beside each main point, covering the answer and answering on scrap paper before you check. The questions you miss show you what to study. The cue column of a Cornell page is built for this.

10. Space your reviews out

The other high-utility technique in that review is distributed practice: spreading study sessions over time instead of cramming. Students do better when the same total study time is spread across several days. For a lecture course, we'd quiz ourselves the day after class, at the end of that week, a couple of weeks later and before the exam. Each round goes faster, because you skip the questions you keep getting right.

Short versions for textbook reading and meetings

Reading a textbook

With the book open, it's easy to copy whole sentences. UNC's guide to taking notes while reading suggests turning headings into questions first, reading a paragraph or two at a time, and waiting until the end of a page to write. We'd add one rule: look away from the book while you write. If you can't put a section in your own words without peeking, read it again.

Meetings

At work, the after step matters most. Write the agenda at the top before you start. During the meeting, put each decision and action item where you can spot it at a glance, with a name and a date. Send follow-ups the same day, while the meeting is fresh. Our guide on how to take meeting notes goes into more detail.

Where a smart pen fits

None of these habits needs special equipment. A smart pen changes one thing: your handwritten page also becomes a digital copy you can review and search. We make Ophaya smart pens, so keep that in mind here.

The Ophaya pen writes in ink and has an infrared camera that reads a printed dot pattern, so it captures handwriting on Ophaya dot-code notebooks and the Ophaya LCD writing tablet. Ordinary paper holds the ink, but nothing is captured. Pages sync live over Bluetooth to the free Ophaya Pro+ app on iPhone, iPad or Android, and the pen stores about 1,000 pages offline and syncs them when you reconnect. OCR in the app converts handwriting to editable text, which you can export to Word and search like any document. Check the converted text before relying on it.

The app can also record audio on your phone or tablet (the pen has no microphone) and links it to what you wrote. If recording is allowed, a line marked "missed" becomes a spot you can replay. Syncing, OCR and app recording don't need a subscription. The pen won't write your questions or quiz you, though, so habits 8 to 10 are still on you.

Frequently asked questions

How do you take notes without writing everything down?

Wait until you've heard a whole idea, then write it as a short phrase of your own. Listen for anything the instructor repeats, writes on the board or says will be tested. Unsure whether something matters? Jot a word with a "?" and decide during your review.

How often should I review my notes?

Once within a day, then in short self-quizzes spread over the following weeks. Later passes can be quick, since you only answer the questions you wrote instead of rereading pages.

Is it better to take notes by hand or on a laptop?

The evidence is mixed. In a 2014 study, students who typed tended to transcribe lectures and did worse on conceptual questions, but a 2019 replication found no consistent difference between groups. We think the own-words habit matters more than the tool. Our article on handwriting vs typing notes goes through the research.

Is underlining my notes worth it?

Not much on its own. The Dunlosky review rated underlining and marking up text as low utility. One color kept for gaps can help you find them later. Spend the rest of that time covering your notes and answering your own questions.