how do u take notes? (1 Viewer)

[oot123]

entering y11 and have a lot of writing-heavy subjects and can’t decide how i want my notes.

i feel like the most efficient way for notes for me is doing them digitally but writing may be better for tests?

my subjects are chem, ext maths, eng adv, legal, eco, modern. what do people recommend for note taking, ik it’s very personal but i need ideas lol

 

[its_ace21]

my teachers always said to hand-write because it would make us get used to writing a lot without making our hands tired which was important for the hsc and its good for memory but i typed up all my notes

 

[AsuTeksu]

You are better off typing your notes because in reality, if you handwrite them, are you really going to keep up with that? Especially when homework and assignments start piling up...

Type them up and just turn them into flashcards then do timed writing practice every now and then to get used to writing for exams.

 

[Cute-Duckie]

I'm the same as you (entering year 11) but have an accelerated subject, and what I've been doing is handwriting notes when our teacher asks us to / when I feel like it, but when taking photos and putting them on an online document along with the other notes I've made on my computer. I have a big document and sort all my notes under each syllabus dot point which I find quite useful.

I'm also planning to start adding some weights to my pens this year to make my hands stronger when I do write, bc I definitely do not have the stamina and am not fast enough for the three hours of writing in the exam

 

[mvrcuriee]

i prefer typing notes, using syllabus dash points and just utilising a t arnotes, past notes and making sure i can answer the “learn to” section

 

[CeeTia]

Basically how I do it is that I type notes, then print the essential ones and I annotate them! So I add extra information by handwriting stuff, highlighting them and basically that's where I do a lot of my revision and retaining.

Ofc I can't do that for every single pair of notes I have but I basically have like a main masterdoc of notes for each subject which I have as my main source of info if I ever gotta check information and stuff

 

[CeeTia]

I'm the same as you (entering year 11) but have an accelerated subject, and what I've been doing is handwriting notes when our teacher asks us to / when I feel like it, but when taking photos and putting them on an online document along with the other notes I've made on my computer. I have a big document and sort all my notes under each syllabus dot point which I find quite useful.

I'm also planning to start adding some weights to my pens this year to make my hands stronger when I do write, bc I definitely do not have the stamina and am not fast enough for the three hours of writing in the exam

Yo same!! I've seen this battery thing online where you add batteries onto your pen so there's some extra weight. But keep in mind, don't put too many cause you might strain the muscles on your hand/end up injuring yourself and that's counterproductive. I also heard that the weight thing might also mess with your handwriting but as long as you take that into account it should be fine!

 

[raindance42]

what I did was create "master notes" - basically for each topic, everything I decided I needed to know, and I would type those, just so they could be neat, organised, and summarised, and I could go back and add stuff in. But other than that I handwrote them to get used to writing

 

[liamkk112]

entering y11 and have a lot of writing-heavy subjects and can’t decide how i want my notes.

i feel like the most efficient way for notes for me is doing them digitally but writing may be better for tests?

my subjects are chem, ext maths, eng adv, legal, eco, modern. what do people recommend for note taking, ik it’s very personal but i need ideas lol

digital notes is really good for long term notes because its so much more organised and easy to lookup information. however for taking notes in class, i would really recommend writing notes by hand, it just makes the information stick. even if you do make digital notes, i would still be writing out the notes too, personally otherwise the information just doesnt go into my mind if i just type everything up, but each to their own

also, for math i didnt take any notes, but if u do want to handwritten is pretty much the only way to go, unless if you're bothered to learn latex or type out all the equations slowly in word or docs

 

[Cute-Duckie]

Yo same!! I've seen this battery thing online where you add batteries onto your pen so there's some extra weight. But keep in mind, don't put too many cause you might strain the muscles on your hand/end up injuring yourself and that's counterproductive. I also heard that the weight thing might also mess with your handwriting but as long as you take that into account it should be fine!

Yeah that's a good point, thank you! I was actually recommended to use batteries last year by my PDHPE teacher who makes his whole year 12 class do it, so I'm hoping that it'll turn out okay if he's done it and had success.

 

[Average Boreduser]

my teachers always said to hand-write because it would make us get used to writing a lot without making our hands tired which was important for the hsc and its good for memory but i typed up all my notes

entering y11 and have a lot of writing-heavy subjects and can’t decide how i want my notes.

i feel like the most efficient way for notes for me is doing them digitally but writing may be better for tests?

my subjects are chem, ext maths, eng adv, legal, eco, modern. what do people recommend for note taking, ik it’s very personal but i need ideas lol

Only make notes when you don't have the resources for them, or else you are quite literally just copy and pasting for 4hrs each day. Whilst it may help u to memorise content, it's practically useless now that nesa is making their exams more and more irl related with their own little senarios, rather what they previously did where they'd blatantly just ask you to explain a concept or define smn (I feel like this is targetted predominantly to bio but fk it that subject sucks). Application of concepts is where its at

 

[totally_screwed]

typing notes all the way, except for maths. I typed my notes and then come exam period I would read my notes, a page or section at a time, then handwrite what I retained (dotpoints or mindmap). then I'd look back at my notes and check if I missed anything or got smth wrong. I remember doing this esp for SOR and it worked like magic, worked for me at uni as well

for other subjects where I typed notes like business and biology I just read them frequently enough to retain most of it, but I still hand wrote summaries of the typed notes at some point as a test of my memory, handwriting practice is good for exams too

just an idea

 

[CeeTia]

Hey guys how would you recommend making notes for history subjects (in my case Modern History)

Should I separate them into topics + categories? Should I have a book exclusively for history notes?

 

[Cute-Duckie]

Hey guys how would you recommend making notes for history subjects (in my case Modern History)

Should I separate them into topics + categories? Should I have a book exclusively for history notes?

Yes and yes in my opinion. I don't do modern history but I do Ancient, and I find the easiest way is to do notes by separating them into the syllabus dot points so you know you haven't missed anything. But it does also depend on your teacher's teaching style, so I'd ask them for help as well.

Personally I find separating them into syllabus dot points (basically topics and categories) makes my notes more coherent and easier to study, but ultimately its just about what's easiest to both write and revise for you!

 

[CeeTia]

Yes and yes in my opinion. I don't do modern history but I do Ancient, and I find the easiest way is to do notes by separating them into the syllabus dot points so you know you haven't missed anything. But it does also depend on your teacher's teaching style, so I'd ask them for help as well.

Personally I find separating them into syllabus dot points (basically topics and categories) makes my notes more coherent and easier to study, but ultimately its just about what's easiest to both write and revise for you!

Ah okay! Thank you so much for the response!

The main problem I had was that there's just so much content in any history subject that I wasn't sure exactly how to make them into notes without cramming all the info in, but this was really helpful! Thank you!!!

 

[Cute-Duckie]

All good! And yeah that completely makes sense, it can be tricky to navigate at first but as long as you make sure you've ticked off everything in the syllabus you'll be fine!