Note-Taking Techniques

My students often ask me for advice on how to take good notes. This is a hard task to comply with because, well, it’s been a very long while since I’ve taken a class/course. BUT I do take notes of stuff I read, so this compilation of blog posts should be useful.

A proposed heuristics to discern which analog (Index Cards, Cornell Notes, Everything Notebook) or digital (Synthetic Note, Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump row) to use for note-taking.

This blog post tries to answer the question that I get asked most often regarding note-taking: when to use an analog or digital note-taking solution, and which one should we use?

How to take notes of a book or book chapter when it is not possible to scribble nor highlight the source.

This blog post is intended to showcase how I take notes of a book or book chapter where I am not able to do any highlighting nor scribbling. This means I will discuss the Everything Notebook, writing Index Cards and developing Cornell Notes.

Reading, highlighting, annotating, scribbling, note-taking: A walk-through my digital and analog systems.

In this post, I integrate my entire digital and analog workflow on how to take notes and read.

Taking notes effectively.

This post is a brief reflection on how I take notes of meetings, conference talks, etc.

Writing a synthetic note off a book or book chapter

While this blog post is also connected to my Literature Review ones, this one describes a process that is specific to how to read and take notes. So I’ll include it here and in my Reading Techniques section too.

Note-taking techniques I: the Index Card Method.

This post relates to how I use index cards to summarize articles, write notes, etc.

Note-taking techniques II: the Everything Notebook Method

In this post, I discuss how I write on my Everything Notebook, which yes, I use for absolutely everything.

Note-taking techniques III: the Cornell Notes Method

William Pauk developed the Cornell Notes method to capture information from lectures, but in this blog post I show how I use it to store quotations and notes off readings.

Note-taking techniques IV: Shorthand symbols

In this blog post, I explain some of the shorthand symbols I use to write not only on the margins of my highlighted articles and book chapters and papers, but also in my notes everywhere.

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