Efficient note taking methods

Q/E/C method- The Q/E/C method is another study method that Cal Newport talks a lot about in his Straight-A book. Q/E/C stands for Question/Evidence/Conclusion, and the main purpose of this system is to structure all of your lecture into question, evidence and conclusion formats that you can then compile into one big study guide. Besides reducing the amount of unnecessary information transcribed into your notes, the Q/E/C system creates a clear and obvious interrelation between topic, conclusion and the stream of facts and arguments that connect the two. Furthermore, this note-taking system is two-in-one, since, besides helping you organize information while you are reading or attending your lectures, you’re also creating valuable study materials to use during revision

Morse Code Method- The Morse code method is a note-taking method envisioned by Cal Newport and focus mainly on taking advantage of written materials. Whenever you find a sentence that seems to be laying out a main idea, you should draw a dot next to it in the margin; if you then come across an example or explanation that supports that big idea you should draw a dash next to it on the margin. This allows you to record information without breaking your reading momentum so you can then take notes. The act of taking the dots you’ve written and transforming them into notes is called the processing stage and it basically requires you to paraphrase the main idea in your own words in a bullet point. The author then encourages you to take all of these sentences and review them in the format of a major question: “What is the main question being asked in the article? What is the conclusion the authors point towards?”

Flow Notes – Flow notes are very similar to mind maps but they have no rules in terms of structure. Although difficult to review, they allow you to incorporate a large amount of information during your class, because they are a free pass for you to simply throw facts, arguments, topics and dates on the page with no specific order while connecting and linking these ideas as you hear them. Flow notes are great for those who hate transcribing information and prefer to process what they’re hearing into workable sentences or words; it’s an holistic method that works wonders for classes with no clear structure, or discussion with interrelated components that aren’t easily organized via outline or mind map format. In case your class is highly dense on information, making it impossible to compress all of the facts, you can still use flow notes as a hybrid system to comment and annotate original materials and textbooks to create summaries or visual aids for complex chapters or topics.