All these things, like mind-map, note-taking and note-making are already known to you but you do not know that you know.

Now let’s start, what do you generally do when you are listening to an important lecture, speech or interview etc and you need to record its valuable information with you?

Of course you take notes, and when you are free you put those points into a continuous or at least some intelligible format and now what you did is note-making. And right before note-taking when you consider over the plan of recording the lecture, speech or interview and you ask yourself these questions;

    Why should I record?
    What is its advantage?
    What way should be adopted?
    What are the best strategies?

In doing so you are making mind-map. So let’s get started from note-taking.

Note-taking

If you are a student you are reading this page for fairly good reasons. You definitely would be having a paper and a pen and would be noting all required information on this page in points. Now what you are doing is note-taking. Note-taking is the process of recording any lecture, speech, interview, article, webpage or anything in shortest possible time in which you use your own shorthand skills and in many ways your note-taking is intelligible only to you.

Why we take notes?

We take note for the following reasons;

We think the information is valuable to be noted.
The information is not available elsewhere.
We want to save time.
We don’t want to miss anything important.

Examples of note-taking

Suppose there is a newspaper journalist and he is listening to a politician in press conference. His job is to record the speech and he does it by recording important information into points on his notebook.

Suppose you are sitting in classroom and your teacher is teaching you. Now teacher doesn’t go at the speed that you can write everything rather you have to take pace with him / her and this you can do by noting few important things into points. That will save your time without missing any important information.

Methods of note-taking

There are many methods by which you can take note. Consider the points below.

Develop some shorthand of your own, like; b/w for between, b/c for because, & for and, @ for at etc.

Try to note one important word than the whole sentence. If you just note one important word it will later on, while making notes, remind you of the whole thing, e.g. if you just write the word democracy you will remember everything that relates to it later when you are making notes at home.

Speech, interview, article or lecture maybe an hour long but things that are important maybe just very few. Avoid going into details, just collect few things that are important and by reading them you can recollect all that associate them.

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