How to Take Notes That You Will Actually Use Later

Most people take notes during class and never look at them again until the night before an exam, which defeats most of the purpose. This post looks at a few note taking systems, including the Cornell method and a simpler outline based approach, and explains when each one tends to work best depending on the subject. We also get into the ongoing debate between handwriting notes versus typing them, since research on this is more mixed than people usually assume. The main point throughout is that notes are only useful if you actually revisit and rework them, so we spend some time on how to turn raw notes into something worth studying from later.