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.

[soccerplayer]

on 11/5/2007 Maire Martinez you are wrong you should NEVER make notes colorful you would be detracted on the colors instead of what is important yes color makes it PRETTY but it also can make it PRETTY DETRACTING.

Everything else you said was correct.

on 8/8/2006 Use colored pens in your notes - you'll remember it better. You can also make up your own system of color coordinating your notes (Ex. red = main ideas, blue = names/dates/etc., black = details). And make sure you keep your notes organized! A loose-leaf binder or spiral bound notebook will help.

on 1/9/2006 The most helpful tip I have found is to type my notes as soon as possible after class. Also typing notes while reading the text or those you have highlighted. This may sound like to much extra work, but if you have a poor memory then this will help. Plus you will have a great study guide to go over for the test.

on 11/22/2005 Using the outline method, turn headings into questions. Then read and take notes that answer the question.

For example: Heading: "Our National Parks Are Being Threatened." Turn into a question and read and take notes to get the answer: "What Are National Parks? How Are They Being Threatened?"

This is a great way to review for exams. You'll find that many times these same questions appear on tests!

on 11/22/2005 When you find something important use those mini Post-it note tabs and place it on that page. Then write down a few notes on it, or you can get colored tabs and have a different color for each character, quote, etc.