How to Take Reading Notes

Remembering what you read will help your schoolwork, and taking good reading notes will help you retain what you've read.

Difficulty:

Moderately challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Highlighter Pens
• Index Cards
• Multicolored Pens
• Spiral Notebooks

1. Budget enough time for taking notes. The time you spend now will pay off down the line with less review time and increased retention.

2. Date your notes, and write full bibliographic information next to the date, including author, title, publication, date of publication, city, publisher, and volume number for journal articles.

3. Take notes in outline form to structure the material, and break it into related chunks and subchunks.

4. Use the structure of the book (or article) as the structure of your notes. For instance, chapters correspond to major headings, chapter sections to subheadings.

5. Note anything that is pertinent to the author's argument; try to avoid trivial minutiae. Important points tend to come in introductory and concluding paragraphs.

6. Distinguish facts from opinions, and quotations from summaries, in a way that will make it clear which is which when you review your notes.

7. Review your reading notes the next day, and do it again a few days later. This is a time-efficient way of retaining the material.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider using index cards if you're taking notes for a research paper. Be sure to list the bibliographic information on a separate, numbered card. This will make your notes much easier to organize.

• One way of deciding what is relevant is to "cheat" by reading the conclusion first so that you'll know what's important as soon as you come across it in the text.

• Use abbreviations in your notes. For instance, an upward-pointing arrow for "increase" and a delta for "change."

• If you're writing down a quotation, make sure you get it exactly right.