Writing Notes

Writing notes

In your daily life you may need to take notes while listening or reading for various reasons:

· to help you remember instructions, eg how to use a photocopier at work

· to help you understand important information, eg how to apply for a job

· as the basis for preparing information of your own, eg to write a report.

Essentially, in notetaking you are determining how well you have understood the content and which parts of this information are most relevant to your needs.

There are generally three levels at which you should address information you read or hear:

· global information – synthesise information or draw conclusions

· local information – locate details or understand individual terms or words

· trivial information – understand the detail even though it is not necessarily relevant to the main topic.

Before you begin writing notes, you can do a quite a bit of preparation.

· You can predict what may be said or written.

You look at the synopsis of a report … open a magazine and flick through the pictures … have an idea what the speaker is going to talk about.

· You can skim a written text to get the gist.

You may not be interested in all the details in the text. You may just want a general overview. To do this, you skim (or look quickly over) the text for some idea of what it is about. The first sentence in a newspaper story often gives a good overview of the content.

· You can scan the text to find particular information.

Sometimes you can search for an answer to a particular question, or a specific word or phrase and disregard the rest. Most people do not read every word of a text when reading with a purpose in mind. Instead, they search for key words which give the important information.

Linear approach to notetaking

A linear approach can be useful if you need to create notes for personal use. Linear notes include:

· headings, subheadings, numbered and bullet points

· a mixture of key/important phrases, sentences and other important highlights that are relevant to your research.

Below is an example of a linear layout.

Notetaking example

When taking notes, it is important to pick out the main parts, as in the following example.

Mario’s story
Mario is a 35yearold married man. He came to Australia in 2008 and settled into a job as a factory worker. Back in Brazil, he studied medicine and earned a degree. He worked as a General Practitioner but relocated to Australia to marry his Australian wife. Since he has been in Australia, he has volunteered his services to many children’s charities, while he studies medicine in Australia in the hope of being able to become a doctor here. His focus is to work at the Royal Children’s Hospital one day, as that is the area in which he would like to specialise.

Below are notes about Mario’s story written using the linear approach to notetaking.

Notetaking tips

· Make sure your title stands out. Use capitals and bold letters.

· Underneath the title. Don’t forget to include the source of the information.

· Bold the main headings so they stand out.

· Place all your main points under the headings, using a bullet, number or letter.

· Subpoints should be indented under main points, so that the level of importance is identified.

· Subpoints should also be indented, using a number or bullets.