How to take effective notes

During the first year of my GCSEs, I didn’t take any notes. I thought that I would be able to remember all the information from lessons. I was wrong. As the exam dates drew nearer, it became clear to me that I wasn’t doing nearly as well as I had hoped, so I started taking notes. After this, my grades in mock exams greatly improved, and I managed to achieve the final grades that I had hoped for. With this experience, when I started my A-Levels, I wanted to ensure that I was as organised as possible with my notes, to make notetaking as easy as possible for myself, and maximise my retention of information.Notetaking helps improve your engagemen with the content and gives you good revision resources for later.

1.The best notetaking app (in my opinion)

I like to take my notes digitally. I find it difficult to organise handwritten notes, and I like the advantage of being able to easily edit, correct, and rearrange digital notes, so I have always used apps to take notes, rather than a pen and paper. If handwritten notes are your preference, you may want to skip to the next section.

During my GCSEs, I used LibreOffice (1) – an equivalent of Google Docs (2) or Microsoft Word (3). This worked alright, but I found it a bit unsatisfactory. Adding nice formatting felt tedious, and it was full of features that I didn’t really need. So, I decided to look for something better. Eventually I settled on an app called Obsidian (4).

There are several reasons why I like Obsidian. Firstly, unlike the previously mentioned word processors, Obsidian doesn’t use Rich Text (5). Instead, it uses a format called Markdown (6), meaning that under the hood, each document is just plain text, but Obsidian can render it in a way that’s easy to read for humans. I have always found editing text to be easier than property-based editing, especially because it’s a lot clearer where the boundaries of, e.g. a piece of bold text are. It also makes the user interface much easier to understand as all the modifications to the document are done via text, and you do not need a separate button for each.

Next is the ability to open a workspace – or “vault”, as Obsidian calls it (7) – rather than individual files. I have one vault for each of my subjects, and when I open one, I immediately have access to all previous notes I have taken, rather than having to find individual files and open them separately. Alongside this feature is the ability to link between notes (8). In most subjects, content from one week is built upon a previous topic. So, when you’re taking notes, and something relies on previous information, you can link back to notes on the earlier topic, allowing these earlier notes to be referenced when revising later content. This feature can also be used to link between different parts of the same note, although I use that feature less.

The final thing I like about Obsidian is the support for maths notation. This was my main gripe with LibreOffice; since I take subjects which rely quite heavily on mathematical formulae – Maths, Physics, and to some extent, Computer Science – maths is something I need to write quite often. Traditional text processors are not very good for this. You can just about write powers using superscript (e.g. 2¹²), but fractions and square roots are extremely common, and neither can be easily written in plain text. Instead, we need some kind of special language for defining maths syntax, and that’s exactly what Obsidian has. Obsidian uses MathJax (9) to allow you to write complex formulae, which display nicely. Admittedly this isn’t useful for most subjects, but it’s particularly valuable to me. (10)

A mathematical formula written in Obsidian with MathJax

2.Flashcards

The other app I use for revision is Anki (11). Anki has already been mentioned in another article about revision apps (12), but I thought it was relevant to talk about how I use it here. Anki is a flashcard app which uses spaced repetition (13), meaning flashcards repeat less frequently the better you know them, allowing you to build long-term memory.

You can use Anki for basically any subject: Words in foreign languages, maths formulae, key definitions, important information, or any other way you can think of to help you memorise content. Depending on how heavily you use it, it only takes about 5-10 minutes a day and, in my experience, it helps immensely for memorisation. I used Anki for Biology and Portuguese during my GCSEs, and it was extremely helpful to build up my memory of the subjects, alongside other revision methods.

There are plenty of online tutorials on how to use both Obsidian and Anki, so I won’t go into detail here.

3.Taking notes

Notetaking software alone isn’t enough to get you good grades. The way you take notes also matters. I use a method called Cornell Notes (14), where you make three sections: Notes, which holds the main information about the subject; Summary, which is great for revision, allowing you to quickly look through a summary of the notes to remind yourself of the information, and Cues, which is also super helpful for revision, containing exam-style questions to help you practise your knowledge.

I also add another section, called Keywords. This doesn’t apply to every subject, but it contains a list of important keywords from the topic. You can look through this list and try to define each term to make sure you remember what each of them means. They are also very helpful for creating Anki decks.

An example of the navigation generated by Obsidian

The most important part of notetaking is that you understand your notes. They’re for you to read, not anyone else. This includes the way you write information – some people like to use bullet points, but I prefer full sentences – and the way you structure your notes. I like to use headings for each section, as Obsidian has a really nice feature where you can jump around by heading, and it makes it very easy to quickly look over the contents of a particular note and find the bit you need. One reason I like digital notetaking is that I can easily reorganise my notes and try different layouts, seeing what suits me best.

As well as providing good revision resources for later, the process of notetaking also greatly improves your retention of a particular topic (15). For this reason, it is generally a good idea to take notes in your own words, rather than directly copying information from the PowerPoint or what the teacher says. This forces you to think about the content, rather than copying the exact wording without paying attention. Be careful though, some wording is important. If you completely rewrite an important definition, you could end up losing marks in an exam by wording it wrong.

The last key is how, and when, to take notes. Often during a class, the teacher is presenting information faster than you can write it down, and you also need to engage and answer questions, so it can be hard to take notes. To get around this, I like to take shorthand notes during the class, then expand them later. My shorthand will include the main points and keywords, and then during one of my free periods, or after the end of the school day, I will go back through, using lesson recordings or PowerPoints to fill out the definitions and make easy-to-read notes. Once the learn lessons of the topic are complete, I write a short summary, collect the keywords and come up with some questions to test myself later. 

These are mostly my opinions based on previous experience, and different methods will work better for different people. Nonetheless, I hope some of the information in this article is useful to you.

Citations

(1) The Document Foundation. (2011). LibreOffice. https://www.libreoffice.org/

(2) Google. (2006). Google docs. https://docs.google.com/

(3) Microsoft. (1983). Microsoft word. http://microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/word

(4) David Eastman. (2022). Obsidian and the Case for Using More Markdown. The New Stack. https://thenewstack.io/obsidian-and-the-case-for-using-more-markdown/

(5) Microsoft. (2008). Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification Version 1.9.1. https://web.archive.org/web/20190708132914/http://www.kleinlercher.at/tools/Windows_Protocols/Word2007RTFSpec9.pdf

(6) John Gruber. (2004). Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax and Documentation. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

(7) Barbara Krasnoff. (2023). The best notetaking apps for collecting your thoughts and data. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/23942597/notes-text-evernote-onenote-keep-apps

(8) Dynalist Inc. (2020). Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/

(9) American Mathematical Society. (2009). MathJax. https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/

(10) Mark Dominus. (2012). MathJax Basic Tutorial and Reference. Stack Exchange. https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference/

(11) Damien Elmes. (2006). Anki. https://apps.ankiweb.net/

(12) Daria Kachanovich. (2023). 10 Best Apps for Most Effective Revision. The Internews. https://www.theinternews.com/post/10-best-apps-for-more-effective-revision

(13) Paul Smolen, Yili Zhang, John H Byrne. (2016). The right time to learn: mechanisms and optimization of spaced learning. PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5126970/

(14) Walter Pauk. (2010). How to Study in College (edition 10). Wadsworth. https://lsc.cornell.edu/how-to-study/taking-notes/cornell-notetaking-system/

(15) Manick Saran, Madeline Krentz Gober, E Berryhill McCarty. (2022). An introduction to the Cornell Note system. Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01455613221146457