Study Notes: A Student’s Journey

I think that we all make study notes at least once a year; however, not everyone may make study notes for every single test or quiz they have. Some may spend loads of energy on their notes and enjoy making them, while others may feel it’s just another chore.

I only recently started to like taking notes. Up until now, they were just something I had to do to help me study. I started to make my notes look a whole lot neater and although they may not be Pinterest worthy, they still look neat enough for me to want to look back to them. I also started to put down less unnecessary information and became more succinct, rather than reproducing a pure copy of the textbook. Adding colours will make some of the information pop out and it’ll also make your page a little brighter and more aesthetically pleasing. 

While I’m not saying that everyone should spend hours and hours on their notes to make them look like pieces of art, I think that it’d be quite helpful to make them at least appealing.

A Few Advantages of Taking Neater Notes

First of all, taking neater notes obviously means that they’re going to look better. Better looking notes will motivate you to go back to them and actually study. 

They’ll also be a whole lot easier to study from, since it’s laid out nicely and written in your own words.

Taking the time to make your notes neater and easier to read will probably help you study! The more time you put into it, the more you focus, helping you study the material.

A Few Advantages of Taking More Succinct Notes

First off, it’s a lot easier to study from shorter, to-the-point notes. You don’t need to spend as much time when you’re reviewing them and it’s a lot easier to skim through.

Since it looks like there’s less material to go over, it feels a lot less stressful when reviewing. I think this is a bonus, especially when you don’t have too much time to study or if you have a lot of stuff to study. Also, drawing pictures for the topics helps to visualize the content and help you memorize the topics better.

How to Take Neat Notes

A few things that I like to keep in mind to take neater notes are indentations and colours. Also, drawing pictures and using Post-It Notes and an insert message is helpful.

Indentations help you categorize different pieces of information into headings and subheadings. An example would be:

These will help your notes look a lot more organized and it’ll be a lot easier to read later. This picture is merely a layout that I like to use and there are many more things that you can do. I think the trick is finding one that works well for you. Remember, you can always find someone else’s layout and tweak it a little to match what you like!

Using coloured pens or highlighters can help to emphasize key parts of the page or section. This will help when you’re studying. Your writing will stop looking like a block of words and will take less effort to study later.

How to Take More Succinct Notes

I think that there’s one main trick to taking succinct notes and that’s to use bullet points and use some pictures if it is applicable.  

Bullet points help you avoid making your notes look like a block of text. They’re visually a lot easier to follow and they’re a lot easier to skim. They’re also a lot easier to write because you don’t have to use full sentences. Using abbreviations is a lot more friendly to the eye and is more time efficient. Listing these abbreviations on a post-it is another thing that I like to do!

Yet, the truth is that I still try to find ways to make my notes much simpler and articulate!  

My Favourite Stationery

Here I’ll talk about what I like to use while taking notes. Most of it really isn’t necessary, especially when you get better at taking notes.

• Jet stream pens
• Energel pens
• Highlighters (Mildliners)
• Brush pens
• Graph paper
• Post Its
• A Ruler
• Whiteout

But honestly, all you really need is:

• A pen
• Paper
• A highlighter/a pen with different coloured ink
• Whiteout 

My notes used to look very bad and I didn’t like to take notes. I only recently started looking at studyblrs and studygramers that made me want to take aesthetic notes. My handwriting looked illegible, but I practiced and got it to look a lot neater. I definitely enjoy studying much more than before. If I can do it, anyone can, as long as they want to, that is.

This note-taking technique might not work for everyone, it might be too time-consuming for some. But this is something that I’ve settled with for now and it’s helped me study, so I hope this would be helpful for you, too. Thanks for reading and I really hope this might help you, too!