How to Take Better Notes: What I Tell My Students When They Say Studying Isn’t Working
The bell had just rung, and most of the class was already halfway out the door. Marcus stayed at his desk, flipping through his notebook with a look I’d seen a hundred times before—frustration mixed with something close to defeat.
“I don’t get it,” he said, sliding the notebook toward me. “I write everything down. I study for hours. And then I sit down for the test and my brain just goes blank.”
I looked at his pages. Every line was filled, every sentence intact. He had copied my slides almost word for word, the same examples, the same definitions. He had highlighted half the page in yellow, and the other half in pink. It was thorough. It was neat. And it was almost completely useless.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down in the desk next to him. “Let’s try something.”
That conversation with Marcus is one I’ve had in some form every year. Most students aren’t taught how to take notes. They’re told they need them, but no one ever shows them what that actually looks like. So they default to the only strategy they know: write more, write faster, underline everything. The notebook becomes a transcript, not a tool. And when they study, they read it over like it’s a textbook, waiting for the information to soak in through osmosis. It never does.
The fix isn’t a new app or a fancy set of colored pens. It’s a simple shift in how they think about the page. Notes should be a conversation with yourself, not a recording of what the teacher said. And that starts with leaving some deliberate blank spaces.
I told Marcus to take his next set of notes with a rule: after every class, he had to write one sentence at the bottom of the page—one sentence that said, in his own words, what the whole lesson was about. No copying from the board. No definitions. Just a plain-English summary that his younger self would understand.
He looked skeptical but agreed to try it. The next day, he had history notes on the French Revolution. At the bottom of the page, he had written, “Basically, the king spent too much money and the people got really angry.”
“Is that right?” he asked, a little embarrassed.
“It’s better than right,” I said. “It’s yours.”
That single sentence forced him to do something he hadn’t done before: he had to sort through everything I’d said and decide what actually mattered. That process of sorting is where the learning happens. The handwriting is just the starting point. The real work is the thinking you do after the ink dries.
Over the next few weeks, I saw Marcus start to experiment. He made a simple two-column split on his page—a narrow margin on the left, a wider area on the right. He wrote his main notes on the right, but in the left margin, he jotted down questions or single-word cues. Instead of writing “The Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh reparations on Germany,” he wrote “What did the Treaty do?” in the margin. When he studied, he covered the right side with a piece of paper and tried to answer his own questions out loud. If he couldn’t, he knew exactly what to go back to.
That’s a version of something called retrieval practice, but I didn’t say that to Marcus. I just told him, “The habit of covering things up and testing yourself is the habit that’s going to actually get you somewhere.”
It wasn’t instant. There were days when his notes were messy, when he got lazy and didn’t do the summary sentence, when he fell back into copying verbatim just to feel productive. I reminded him that that feeling—the busywork of writing—is exactly what tricks us into thinking we’re studying. It feels like effort, but it’s often just manual labor. The brain isn’t lifting anything.
I noticed another pattern with my students who took good notes without really trying. They weren’t necessarily the fastest writers. They were the ones who asked questions during class, even if quietly. They wrote things in the margins like “why?” or “not sure about this.” They allowed their notes to look unfinished, with blank spaces and question marks. Those students were treating their notes as a work in progress, not a final product. And that made all the difference.
I started making room for that in my teaching. I’d pause mid-lesson and say, “Turn to your partner and spend sixty seconds rewriting your notes as a text message to a friend who missed class.” That forced them to filter and rephrase. Some groaned, but most got into it. I’d walk around and see sentences like, “Bro, the mitochondria is basically the power plant of the cell, don’t sleep on it.” Not academic language. But it was their language, and that’s what made it stick.
For students who struggle with the physical act of writing, I’ve seen the same principle work with typed notes, but with a twist. Instead of typing everything, they’re told to leave out the words “this,” “that,” “so,” and any filler. Then they go back and add their own comments in a different color. The key is the same: the notes have to go through a second pass, a processing step, before they can be used.
Around midterm, Marcus came up to me after class. His notebook was less neat now. There were scratch-outs, arrows, a few doodles in the corner. But he was grinning.
“I actually remember stuff now,” he said. “I don’t even have to study that long. I just go through my questions and see if I can answer them. If I can’t, I go back to the page.”
He said it like he’d discovered a secret. In a way, he had. The secret was that good notes are not a transcript of a lesson. They’re a tool you use to make yourself think, and the physical note-taking part is just the beginning.
I still have students who don’t like writing summaries. Some prefer lists, some prefer diagrams, some just make audio notes on their phones. That’s fine. The point isn’t the format. It’s the act of processing the information twice—once as you write it, and once as you reshape it into something that belongs to you.
I’m not claiming note-taking solves every problem. Marcus still has bad days. He still forgets his notebook sometimes, and he still slips into passive copying when he’s bored. But he knows what to do now. And that’s more than most of us ever had.
If you’re a student reading this, or a parent trying to help your kid, start small. Don’t overhaul the whole system overnight. Just take one set of notes and add a question in the margin, or a summary sentence at the bottom. See what happens. The goal isn’t beautiful notebooks. It’s being able to close the notebook, walk into class, and trust that the information is actually in your head—not just on the page.
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