5 Note Taking Methods (With Examples) and When Each One Works Best

Many university learning centers teach the same five note taking methods: Cornell, outline, mapping, charting and the sentence method. Cornell and outline notes work best for organized lectures, mapping for ideas that connect, charting for comparisons, and the sentence method for lecturers who talk too fast to organize anything. You will probably use two or three, depending on the class.

Below, we write one minute of an intro biology lecture all five ways, then cover how to choose by situation and what research says about handwriting versus typing. We make Ophaya smart pens, but a plain notebook works for everything here.

Five note taking methods, one lecture

The instructor says:

Photosynthesis has two stages. The light-dependent reactions, in the thylakoid membranes, use light energy to split water, which releases oxygen, and they produce ATP and NADPH. The Calvin cycle, in the stroma, uses that ATP and NADPH to build sugar from carbon dioxide.

The descriptions follow learning center guides from Cal Poly and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

1. The Cornell method

Draw a line about 2.5 inches from the left edge and leave a few lines free at the bottom. Notes go in the wide right column during class. Afterward, add cue questions on the left and a short summary at the bottom, then review by covering the notes and answering your cues. Cornell's Learning Strategies Center credits the system to Walter Pauk, an education professor who described it in How to Study in College.

Cornell suits organized lectures and recall-heavy exams, since the cue column becomes a ready-made quiz. The catch is the work after class: skip the cues and summary and you have ordinary notes with a wide margin. Our full guide to Cornell notes covers each step.

2. The outline method

Main points start at the left margin, and each detail is indented under the point it supports.

• Photosynthesis: 2 stages
  • Light-dependent reactions
    • thylakoid membranes
    • split water, release O2
    • make ATP and NADPH
  • Calvin cycle
    • stroma
    • uses ATP and NADPH to build sugar from CO2

Outlines suit organized lecturers, and textbook chapters whose headings hand you the top level. Cal Poly's guide says they struggle in some science classes such as physics and math. The catch is that you sort every point as you hear it, so a fast or jumpy lecture breaks the structure.

3. The mapping method

Mapping, or mind mapping, puts the topic in the center of the page with related ideas branching out from it.

Here, PHOTOSYNTHESIS goes in a circle in the middle. One branch reads "light reactions," with twigs for "thylakoids," "water split, O2 out" and "ATP + NADPH." Another reads "Calvin cycle," with twigs for "stroma" and "CO2 to sugar." An arrow labeled "ATP + NADPH" runs from the first branch to the second. That arrow is the point of the lecture, and a map shows it at a glance.

Maps suit processes, causes and effects, and essay planning. They take space and get messy at speed, so the University of Rochester's library guide suggests taking notes another way first and building the map afterward as review. We agree.

4. The charting method

Charting turns the page into a table. Label the columns once you see the shape of the topic, then fill in cells as the lecture goes.

Charts suit comparisons: stages of a process, wars by cause and outcome, drug classes. Once the columns exist you write very little. The hard part is knowing the categories in advance, and charts fit math problems poorly.

5. The sentence method

Write each new fact on its own numbered line. There is nothing to set up.

1. Photosynthesis has 2 stages.
2. Light reactions happen in the thylakoid membranes.
3. They split water, releasing O2, and make ATP and NADPH.
4. Stage 2 is the Calvin cycle, in the stroma.
5. It uses ATP and NADPH to make sugar from CO2.

Use it for dense, fast lectures where you can hear separate points but can't yet see how they connect. The catch is that nothing on the page shows which points are major, so reorganize these notes within a day or two.

The Rochester guide also lists other styles, such as boxing and flow notes.

The five methods side by side

How to choose a note taking strategy for the situation

A fast lecture

Use the sentence method or a loose outline. Leave a blank line between topics, and reorganize the same day while you still remember the lecture.

A slide-heavy class

If the slides are posted, don't copy them. Write down only what the instructor adds out loud: the example, the reason, the hint about the exam. A Cornell page works well, since the cue column turns those extras into questions.

Reading a textbook

You set the pace, so you can afford slower methods: outline from the chapter headings, then chart anything the chapter compares, like the phases of mitosis. Use your own words. We think copying a textbook line by line teaches very little.

Meetings

Use two columns: discussion in the wide one, and action items with an owner and a due date in the narrow one. For a weekly status meeting, a chart with one row per project is faster.

Handwriting or typing: does it matter?

Any of these methods can be typed, though maps and charts are awkward on a laptop. Which is better for learning is less settled than headlines suggest.

In three studies published in 2014 in Psychological Science, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that students who typed lecture notes on laptops did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand. The typists tended to transcribe the lecture word for word.

In 2019, Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson published a direct replication in Educational Psychology Review, adding an eWriter group and a no-notes group. Some trends favored longhand, but performance did not consistently differ between any of the groups, including the one that took no notes. The authors called it premature to say which method is better.

We sell pens, and we read this as a point about habits more than tools. Most methods above make you condense or connect ideas instead of copying them, which is the habit the 2014 paper pointed to.

Using these methods with a smart pen

A smart pen keeps your method and changes what happens to the page afterward. The Ophaya pen 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 gets ink but no digital copy. Pages sync over Bluetooth to the free Ophaya Pro+ app on iPhone, iPad or Android. Offline, the pen stores about 1,000 pages and syncs them when you reconnect.

Every method above works on a dot-code page, and maps and charts come through as drawn. The app's OCR converts handwriting to editable text, which suits outline and sentence notes, but it is meant for words, so keep diagrams as drawn pages. Check converted text before you share it. Our guide to converting handwriting to text has more.

For fast lectures, the app records audio on your phone or tablet (not through the pen) and links it to what you wrote, so a keyword jotted while falling behind becomes a spot to replay. Check your course's recording policy first.

Export a page as a PDF to share it with a study group. For a full lecture routine, see our guide to using a smart pen for note taking, or read smart pens for college students if you are weighing one for school.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most effective note taking method?

No single method wins in every class. For most lecture courses we would start with Cornell, since review is built into the page, then switch to charting for comparison-heavy topics and the sentence method for very fast lecturers.

How can I take notes faster?

Write less rather than faster. Reuse abbreviations and symbols all term (w/ for with, an arrow for leads to, a star for anything repeated) and skip whatever is on posted slides. When you fall behind, leave a gap and fill it in after class.

Do I need to rewrite my notes?

Not word for word. We think recopying time is better spent quizzing yourself. A short pass the same day helps, though: add cues, turn sentence notes into an outline or chart, or write a three-line summary.

Which note taking method works best for math?

Learning center guides warn that outlines and charts fit math poorly. We would use the Cornell layout instead: worked steps on the right, and a short note on the left explaining why each step happens.