Annotating and Note-Taking
If you do not take notes as you read, you are wasting time and energy. Without notes, you will almost certainly have to reread substantial parts of the text to find passages that are important, and you will almost certainly lose track of the ideas you had as you were reading. While note-taking does slow down your reading, it greatly increases your overall reading efficiency. If you don’t make notes as you go, today’s great observation will likely become tomorrow’s forgotten detail.
There are many ways to take notes, and you need to find methods that work for you and your reading situation. Your annotation method will almost certainly vary depending on whether you are reading a hard copy or an e-version of a text.
You may also find that you need to take notes differently depending on the kind of text you are reading. For example, do you need the same kinds of notes for a textbook that contains information you will be tested on as you do for an article that you are going to write about?
Understanding What to Take Notes About
You want to make sure you are capturing the main ideas in a text, but you also want to record your reactions to the text, particularly where they relate to your purpose for reading. For example, it doesn’t make sense to spend lots of time making notes about the history of an idea when your professor wants you to focus on the implications of that idea.
If you’ve been following the activities in this section, you already have two helpful guides as you read:
- First, you have any notes you made while pre-reading. Even if you didn’t take notes during this phase, you have information about the reading that you might decide to add to your notes as you go.
- You also have the list you made when you were focusing on the purpose for the reading. Refer to that list as you read to help you stay on task.
As you read, here are some particularly useful types of notes:
- Summaries or paraphrases of key ideas in the text
- Your responses, including your questions, points of agreement and disagreement, and notes about connections you see
- Informational notes, including definitions of words you aren’t familiar with and references to other sources
- Your comments on passages that are significant and that you might use in your own writing
Understanding How to Take Notes
Note-taking doesn’t look the same for everyone, and the method you choose will depend on the medium of the text (print or electronic), whether you can write on the text or not, and your preferences for things like color. It will also depend on what accommodations work best for you. Take the time to find the best method for you!
Writing Directly on Hard-Copy Texts
Through most of your K-12 education (and mine), you were probably told never to write in your textbooks, but now that you’re a college student, your teachers will tell you just the opposite. Writing in your texts as you read—annotating them—is encouraged! It’s a powerful strategy for engaging w