THE ART OF NOTE MAKING

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Notes Should Be Precise: Note Making is an art and you need to learn it to simplify your preparation. Below I will discuss how to prepare notes. Notes reduce the size of our books and turn them into compact pieces of paper. I had prepared the entire Psychology notes in 300 pages only. That’s how compact you got to make them.

Don’t Overuse The Highlighter: Read the entire topic first and highlight the important points (Which include definitions, author names, dates). Go through these points again and understand the concept clearly. Now note down the Topic and in bullet points mention these important things in a very short form. Don’t write entire sentences, but just keywords. For example, while preparing notes of short-term memory just write Capacity = 7+-2 (Millers Magic Number) Duration = 15-30 seconds rather than writing the entire paragraph.

Association: While preparing notes, use your intuition and your personal experiences. For example, while reading Mazurs Learning Book, I came across Food Aversion Learning (Which basically says that we show aversion towards foods that make us sick). This topic reminded me of this incident where my friend Rohit got sick after eating a two-day-old Biryani from my fridge. This incident made him hate Biryani so much that he would feel nauseated even by the smell of Biryani. So, while preparing notes for this topic, I just wrote” Rohit’s Biryani” rather than writing the entire description. So, one has to read the entire topic, understand it and associate personal incidents with it to make it relevant and easy to remember.

Flowcharts & Diagrams: Creating diagrams & flow charts will save you a lot of time and trouble. You can stick these pages on your wall or on your table and you can revise them every day.

Look For Patterns and Note Down Sequences: It’s very important to look for patterns and timelines in the study material and books. For example, while studying the auditory system, you can create a sequence of the organs in ascending or descending form. For example, the sequence of the network of auditory pathways from Auditory Nerve to Primary Auditory Cortex (Which covers 7 areas) or the correct order of stages of different theories. NTA won’t ask a question based on the theory but they will definitely ask about the pattern and sequence.