Definition

Note-making comes after note-taking.

Once you take notes on a piece of paper or so, you come home and make them neat because note-taking is just jotting down few words, figures, phrases and shorthand symbols.

Making it meaningful for you so that whenever you read it you could understand the whole thing involves writing it into continuous language that may be intelligible so that it may be of use later on and this is called note-making.

Why note-making?

It is important to make note on account of the following reasons;

Because the paper where you have taken notes is unintelligible. It is not a continuous writing, rather it is just shorthand symbols of your own with no description or explanation and therefore it should be written in intelligible format so that it may be of use later.

Note-taking is just for a short-term memory and you will forget it unless you have written it in proper format. Suppose you have written a phrase, economic constraints, now you will cease to remember anything associated with it had you not made its proper notes in continuous writing and intelligible format.

The paper on which you took notes usually gets discarded whereas note-making is your record and it will remain with you.

Note-making helps in preparation for examination.

Examples of note-making

Suppose you have taken notes from the speech of US president like this;

Economic problems

2001

WTC

Death toll

War against terror

Afghanistan

Iraq

Now you see it is the whole story of 9/11, but what you will do is not to relate it as a story but to relate it as is said by the US president. A thing that matters is what president has said about; economic problems, war on terror, Afghanistan and Iraq etc, not what you know about them. This is missing in the above note-taking but it is in your memory that is why you need to make notes. Now you sit down with plenty of time and note down the whole thing taking help of material where you have taken notes so that you may not forget any point. Try to make notes as soon as possible so that the speech is fresh in your mind and you may not forget even what is not written in note-taking.

Methods of note-making

It is said already that you must make notes as soon as possible. Sometimes there are things that you have not mentioned while taking notes. There may be many reasons for that, e.g. you had very short time, speech or lecture etc was too long, Frequency of important information was high etc etc. In this case what helps you is your memory. The longer the time is elapsed the lesser your memory will support you, so try to make notes as earlier as possible.

Take help of both note-taking and your memory so that you may not forget any important point.

Note-taking has no definite format you just put down things the way you feel better, but try to make notes in continuous writing so that it may be quite intelligible for later use.

Try to make everything clear and easy to understand. Use short sentences and avoid long and winding ones.

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