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Taking Notes - Listen Then Write

Our first lesson on taking notes is about a general mentality, a way of thinking that you should use when you are taking notes so that you don’t find the common problems that many students do with notes. And that mentality is listen, then write. In other words, listening is more important. Listen first, and then write what you hear after.

So here’s the problem that people face. It’s really hard to both listen and write. Doing them at the same time can be very difficult. So, a lot of people try to write everything. But let’s take a look at what happens when you do that. I’m going to listen to a little bit of a lecture and try to write everything I hear, and watch what happens. For example, Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 170 kilometers thick, keeping the surface of the planet nice and warm and also protected from the sun’s radiation.

But a planet like Venus, our next door neighbor, has an atmosphere 100 times thicker than Earth’s, made of greenhouse gases. So Venus is way too hot and toxic to be habitable. Okay. Now I’m still writing and he’s finished talking. And I’m going to eventually not be able to write because I don’t hear it because it’s so far separated.

So when he’s talking about how Venus is toxic, and I’m still writing about Earth, then that causes a problem. Now these are not good notes because there’s too much of it. I’m writing whole words, and I’m trying to write everything. So this is a bad idea. Trying to write every sentence in your notes is not a good approach.

What we need to do instead is to try to hear everything. So let’s see a better example of how I should do that. For example, Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 170 kilometers thick, keeping the surface of the planet nice and warm and also protected from the sun’s radiation. But a planet like Venus, our next door neighbor, has an atmosphere 100 times thicker than Earth’s, made of greenhouse gasses.

So Venus is way too hot and toxic to be habitable. Okay. Now, that’s a lot easier to maintain for long times. And notice I do have some very shortened versions here, like, G.G. for greenhouse gases, and V for Venus, and E for Earth. It’s a good idea to use abbreviations when possible. Now my writing here is a little bit messy, but it’s easier to read also than my notes on the longer version when I tried to write the whole sentences, right?

That was very difficult to read because I had to work so quickly to try to write everything. So your answer here is to hear everything, and then after you listen, after you understand the main ideas, write those main points down in very short form, in just one letter, or short words, short abbreviations of words.

So this way, you’re not taking many notes at all. It’s okay if you’re not taking many notes, that’s not a problem. Try, in fact, just taking zero notes once or maybe even twice. I don’t recommend taking no notes. I recommend taking few notes. So this is a better idea.

This is just an experiment. This is just to learn about the total. On your actual test, on the big day, on the important day, I don’t recommend taking zero notes. That’s a bad idea. But in practice, just one time as an experiment, try taking no notes and see what happens.

You’ll notice that you can take more time to listen, that you can focus more, and this will give you an idea of how much notes you should really be taking. Because if you forget some things when you have no notes, that causes a problem. But it also shows you that you can hear more if you’re not always writing. So you want to have a balance. You want to have both listening and writing.

And primarily, you should be listening for the big ideas. Give this a try and then try taking few notes in your practice after taking no notes once or twice.