How to Organize Notes Canton MI

Steps

1. Take careful notes in class. Don't be sloppy about this-notes must be legible and coherent. Also, always date and title your notes-they will be much easier to organize if you know when they are from and what they are about.
2. Get all of your notes from one class together in one place. This is easiest if you keep them all in one notebook. If you keep them on looseleaf paper, put them in a binder.
3. Put them in order. The type of order you should use depends on your purpose. The most common is chronological order, which is generally effective given that teachers usually have a reason behind the order that they give lectures. However, if you are studying for an exam, you might want to put your notes in order of importance so that you assure that you will study the notes that you think are most important.
4. Look through the notes themselves. Highlight, star or otherwise mark mark the sections in your notes that you believe are most important (especially sections that your teacher emphasized). At the same time, look for anything that you find confusing and make a note to ask your teacher for clarification.
5. Use the textbook (if available) as a resource. Your teacher likely expects you to use the textbook to supplement his/her lectures. Find sections in the textbook that match up to your notes and use the additional facts from the textbook to flesh out your notes. If there is not room in your notes for more information, take out a fresh piece of paper and copy it all down in one place. This will make it much easier to find all the important information when you are studying.

Tips

• Use supplementary materials like dictionaries, class textbooks and even other books on the topic. Only use the Internet if your teacher has suggested it as a resource.
• When taking notes, follow the outline of the lecture. However, when organizing notes, don't be afraid to flesh out your notes with information that you find helpful (e.g. mnemonic devices).
• Listen to your teacher. He/she may give some tips on how to take effective notes and will also give you an idea for how much you should use other materials to supplement your lecture notes.
• Exactly how you should organize your notes depends on the subject. In history, for example, you probably want to emphasize people, places and dates, whereas in math you'd want to emphasize equations and formulas.

Warnings

• If you did not take good notes in the first place, no amount of organizing will fix them.

Things You That Might Need

• Notebooks or loose-leaf binders
• Highlighters
• Textbooks
• Supplementary books
• Fresh paper for rewriting notes
• Notebook paper for writing purposes

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