How to Write Good Notes

Hello to all of you who have looked back on their piles of loose leaf notes the morning before their finals and asked themselves, “What the heck does this say?” Or maybe you fumbled with these same notes for fifteen minutes just trying to get the sheets in order. Either way, disorganized notes are a nightmare to study from. So why not learn a few simple steps to writing awesome notes that you won’t be able to stop staring at?

1. Do not use abbreviations, and remember to write in your own voice. Abbreviated notes are the bane of a panicked reviewer. How is one supposed to tell whether “FR cause: famine” means that “famine” was a cause of the French Revolution (which also took precious minutes to decode) or whether the Revolution caused the famine? It is pretty important to determine causality for writing that exam worth a large percentage of your final mark.
2. Write in a consistent font/calligraphy/style. This means do not get lazy and let your writing become sloppy on that day you are too tired to even pay attention in class. Two benefits arise from maintaining a neat set of notes. The first is that your notes look terrific afterwards. It will be like you typed them in John Smith Font 1. This fact holds even if you are not the best printer, as consistency is all that matters. (But if you do write neatly, your notes get a typewritten look – exciting!) The second benefit is that, if you’re forcing yourself to focus on notes, you’ll also force yourself to awaken from that zombie state and to pay attention in class. Sure, it is hard, but both your knowledge and your notes will benefit from this exercise. 
3. Pre-write your notes if possible. Although this sounds like some advice from the keeners at the front of the class with their know-it-all brains, all ready and prepped before the teacher even starts the lesson, it’s still good advice. By writing notes beforehand (from the textbook, D2L, Wikipedia, etc.), what you are doing is familiarizing yourself with all the areas you are confused about. By the time you take the class, you will know exactly what questions you want the teacher to clarify. If you feel you already understand everything, does that not make the class seem less unnerving? Finally, when you do learn new things in class, it is much easier to add supplemental information to a set of pre-written notes than it is to try and scrawl everything down. Just make sure the supplement is also written in the same style!
4. Get a nice writing utensil. Who wants to write with a dull yellow HB pencil that leaves a trail of graphite that makes your “o”s look like doughnuts and feels like a twig you pulled off the nearest tree? A nice writing utensil like a BIC Reaction or a Papermate FlexGrip Elite not only feels better to write with, but also makes getting out the supplies for note-taking that much more exciting. (If you are not appreciative of nice stationary, stop reading now.) Furthermore, if you have the money and have really good writing, nothing beats using a liquid ink pen…
5. Keep your notes in order and separate from worksheets and the like – preferably in a notebook, but a separate section in a binder will suffice. After all the effort you put into producing the notes that you would hug if you could without wrinkling the paper, the last thing you want to see are random sheets sporadically disrupting the flow of your notes. Keeping your notes distinct from the rabble of other feuilles not only helps you keep them in order and thus avoid the confusion of seeing “enantiomers are/the half-life of a second order reaction can be calculated by…”, but also saves you the trouble of having to go through several double-sided pages and playing Go-Fish to match up the pairs of pages that go together. 
6. Write in the margins. Do not doodle on notes (diagrams are okay). Do not highlight stuff. Either always colour-code, or never colour-code (never doing it requires less work). Write on the lines (none of that cramming two lines of text per line of paper). Learn how to write with kerning.

Happy note taking!