First, you must train yourself to listen. Professors do not just speak in sentences, they speak in paragraphs. This means that every paragraph will have a main idea. Sometimes, professors will put this main idea into writing (on the board, or on a PowerPoint slide). The rest of the paragraph will be an explanation or elaboration of this main idea. There will also probably be examples of this main idea.

So — listen for main ideas, and explanations, and examples of these main ideas. When you take notes, emphasize the main idea (in caps? with a star next to it, maybe?), and then note the explanation or examples after it (with a bullet point or hyphen, or indentation, perhaps?).

You do not want to write down every word. Instead, you will want to learn how to abbreviate some words or ideas, so you can jot them down as they are spoken. Using the mathematical symbols you learned in grammar school is one way to do this. Here are some examples:

Concept X is somewhat like Concept Y

X ~ Y

Concept X is the same as Concept Y

X = Y

Thing X leads to Thing Y

X –> Y

I didn’t understand this part.

?

The professor droned on about his family

…

(make sure this wasn’t really an example of a key concept!)

The professor repeated this twice

! !

Since you mentioned difficulties with notetaking in bio, you may want to devise a personal system to notate key biological terms. You can indeed make up your own abbreviations — just make sure you can understand them afterwards!

And here is the key — after you take notes in class, read over them that night, and rewrite them in your own words. You will find that in re-reading and rewriting your notes, you will internalize their meaning. You will also probably have some questions about them! This is perfect, because now you will have something to raise your hand and ask during (or after) the next lecture, or during your professor’s office hours!

The more you practice this art, the more skilled you will become.

Best wishes to you!

When people tell you to write about the important stuff they mean stuff that will be useful but understandable later. Don’t write down words that are of no use, eg, ‘this means that’ etc.

I don’t know what course you are doing but, for example, in history you might down write a date that the teacher says along with a few key words of what happened.

This gives you the opportunity to do some research later.

You can also make your own abbreviations (just miss out vowels) and use symbols instead of words (arrows etc). this will mean that you have more time to write words.

DON’T WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING!!!

This is impossible!

Just write what YOU think will help you, key words, terms you do not understand, definitions, things you will not remember

Also once you start doing it you will find that it comes naturally

good luck!

Examples would be ,suppose there’re speaking of a place where they visited like Spain or something .

You would say that whoever went there , you would mention Spain , what took place ,things of interest that took place there . Just give a short discription of the event .

Or some people use Digital Recorders , and turn it on and then later they have all the info. to go over on the recorder .

Good luck!