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Brief Guide to Taking Notes


 As a rule note taking should be done judiciously. That is try to select the things you note carefully. The main purpose for writing a note is to help the information lodge in your brain so that you can recall it later. The things that we store should be key or central points. Once stored it is useless unless we think about it and relate it to something.

In other words in an hour and a half there might be one key point or maybe even say five key points.  For instance, for the second lecture for HY/AS3230, a key point is not so much Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), but rather corporations as legal entities, like individuals, with 14th amendment due process protection, which this case established.

So your note would be:

You have the rest of the information in brackets available in the outline I give.

For relevant outlines see:

   http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/hisilg/out2-3230.html

    http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/hisilg/HY3230lec2_files/frame.htm


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Last update August 13, 2001                                            © National University of Singapore - Department of History
Contact: Ian Gordon