Things You'll Need:
- Highlighter Pens
- Index Cards
- Multicolored Pens
- Spiral Notebooks
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Step 1
Budget enough time for taking notes. The time you spend now will pay off down the line with less review time and increased retention.
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Step 2
Date your notes, and write full bibliographic information next to the date, including author, title, publication, date of publication, city, publisher, and volume number for journal articles.
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Step 3
Take notes in outline form to structure the material, and break it into related chunks and subchunks.
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Step 4
Use the structure of the book (or article) as the structure of your notes. For instance, chapters correspond to major headings, chapter sections to subheadings.
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Step 5
Note anything that is pertinent to the author's argument; try to avoid trivial minutiae. Important points tend to come in introductory and concluding paragraphs.
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Step 6
Distinguish facts from opinions, and quotations from summaries, in a way that will make it clear which is which when you review your notes.
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Step 7
Review your reading notes the next day, and do it again a few days later. This is a time-efficient way of retaining the material.
