This Is How You Actually Take Notes In College, Bitches
itâs occurred to me that nobody fuckin knows how to take notes in classes and most advice about it is bad. What the fuck are âkey words?â
So anyway hereâs how Iâve gotten aâs in all my classes in college so far
Iâm not gonna bother too much with telling you to take notes in class. Everyone knows that shit. But most peopleâs note taking skills suck ass and there are two main types of sucking ass I have observed
The first is the one where your notes look like a list of key terms and words. Sometimes they are underlined or there are dashes that connect them to other words. So if your prof was talking about Henry VIII youâd write down something like
Church of Englandâdivorce
DONâT DO THAT. Those words are gonna show up on the test, sure, but writing them down isnât gonna help you with the test. What the fuck does any of that mean? High school is shit and your âkey wordsâ canât help you now.
Hereâs the other type of bad note taking:
It was necessary for Henry VIII to have a male heir who could succeed him, but his wife was unable to conceive a son. The Catholic Church
I stopped writing there because your professor moved on to something else. But, tbh, even if you can write fast enough to keep up with the content of the lectures (and you canât for the entire lecture) itâs not helpful to have a solid wall of Everything That Was Covered In The Lecture, in grammatically correct complete sentences. Are you gonna read that shit again? No!
And honestly most people have like, sentences here and there that look important instead of the whole lecture. Which is also bad.
So whatâs the not shitty way to take notes? It comes down to these principles:
Show Relationships of Things
These kind of go together
I cannot emphasize enough that you donât need to write sentences like a normal person. Shorthand everything, and I donât mean some fucked up studying shorthand you just came up with like âAmRâ for American Revolution, I mean like...fuckin text/memespeak. Donât write complete sentences, completely abandon formality. Abbreviate anything you would in a text message, you know what it means.
HOWEVER: You Must Show How Things Are Related To Things
To understand broad concepts you gotta understand how the things in them are related to other things.
Thatâs why writing down âHenry VIIIâ and âChurch of Englandâ isnât gonna help you, because youâre not learning that there is a Church of England.
Did Henry VIII burn the Church of England? Cheat on his wife with it? Who knows? Definitely not you.
This is why you have to connect stuff like
Catholic Church says no divorce
Henry VIIIâstarts Church of England
But ya know you can make that more memorable AND more clearly show how one thing caused the other
Henry VIII: fuk u *church of england*
Iâm completely dead serious about this, this kind of slang is very good at indicating exactly how things relate to things in zero time and you know exactly what it means and youâll remember it
You have to come up with shorthand to quickly indicate how things are related. Say you write down the definitions of two terms for like, opposing theories on government in class. Thatâs great but youâre leaving it to yourself to work out the opposing part later from what you write, and your brainâs a flaky bitch.
Like part of what youâre doing it giving yourself help with HOW to study your notes later.
So like. Do something like write a jagged line in between the definitions, indicating conflict. Write âOTOHâ or âHOWEVERâ in between in big fuckin letters. Writing down âCatholic Churchâ and what that is and âChurch of Englandâ and what that is, is fine. But like, if the main theme is the contrast between the two, âCatholic Church HOWEVER Church of Englandâ immediately tells you the basicest basics. Itâs like a tiny outline, telling you what to expect. Sure, you can figure it out reading your notes but Iâm telling you how to write skimmable notes that you can glean stuff from even when youâre half spaced out and shit, okay?
Same thing for like, dates and sequences and cause-and-effect and stuff. Even if youâve got the dates down...be sure to put arrows or something so even at a glance youâve got basically whatâs going on.
Also i know it feels like wasting paper but DONT scrunch all your notes together into small space on the paper. That lil dialogue between Henry and the Church of England is spread out over 3 lines which means if you have ADHD like me you can actually fuckin read it. Turn things into bullet lists. Indent things with little arrows to show things leading to things. If thereâs a clear move to a new topic, new page. If youâre actually filling up the paper all the way that shits hard to read and itâs even harder to pick out the Big Important Stuff.
Last word of advice: If you end up like writing down two things and canât tell what theyâre for or how theyâre related to each other...ASK QUESTIONS. Like âIâm sorry can you explain how the Church of England is related to the Catholic Church? I didnât quite catch that.â If talking in class makes you feel like you might be percieved badly, you can frame it like a Nerd Question âSo, what kind of relationship would you say the Church of England and the Catholic Church had?â or just play it off like you didnât hear it like âIâm sorry, what was that last thing you said about the Church of England and the Catholic Church?â
Or just make a mark on your notes to remind yourself that you need more info and to go to your profâs office to ask questions. I would really not be nervous about that, professors normally really like it when students show that they really want to succeed in the class and that they care. Unless theyâre like, a complete dickhead, in which case, fuck what they think, right? Youâre gonna ask questions and itâs their problem because youâre essentially paying them for your presence in the class.
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