Effective Note Taking

Everyone has their own unique learning style.  In lectures some people pick up things simply by listening, others needs graphics/videos to take information in and some people prefer to read information in bullet points.  It is essential to discover which learning style applies to you in order for you to make effective notes while studying.  Information about discovering your personal learning style is available from here.

Personally I am a visual learner.  I need images, colours and videos to make sense of information.  The following is just a few simple ideas I find useful to make my studying as effective as possible:

• Mind maps.  These visual aids are great for brain storming and pulling information out of my head.  They allow you to organise information into sizable chunks in a method which makes sense to me.  Mind maps can be as big or small as you want, contain colour and images.
• Coloured pens.  These are great for differentiating between information and important information.  A particular word written in green pen may act as a trigger to recall the rest of the information.  Colour coding my notes is also extremely helpful to me.
• YouTube.  If you are having difficulty understanding a particular topic, search for a video about it on YouTube which explains it better.  In the exam you may be able to recall what was said-just try avoid getting sucked into YouTube and looking up funny cat videos!!!
• Diagrams.  They say pictures are worth a thousand words.  For me this is most definitely true.  I can pick up complex subject matter from diagrams easier than reading through pages of text.

Which ever learning style applies to you, it is important to find a method of note taking which works best for you.  It will avoid wasting time when studying and ensure you remember the maximum amount of information during an exam.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is something I had never thought about before I started college.  In secondary school we are thought how to use direct quotes and ideas from texts in our work, but nobody ever mentioned anything about referencing where this quote came from. 

Essentially this was stealing.  By not mentioning what book we took the information from, you are taking credit for the authors ideas and passing it off as your own.  There are a few different methods of referencing out there.  From my experience the Harvard Referencing Style is the most popular and recognised.  An online tutorial about this can be found here.

A few quick things to remember when citing someone else's work:

• Paraphrasing.  By re-wording what the original author has said, you are using their idea but not stealing it and claiming it as your own.
• If you do decide to include a piece of information directly from another source, ensure you use quotation marks to show this is not your original work.  This is perfectly acceptable-as long as you reference where it came from!