This session is about creating and organizing your reading notes. When taking reading notes you want to consider how your future self will use them in the coming weeks and months. To do that well, you want to keep three things in mind:
Design your notes. Your notes should be easy to read/skim quickly, helpful for what you will want for your projects later in class, and interesting to look at and read (by adding headings, bold, highlights, links, images, emoji, icons, drawings, etc.).
Make them easily retrievable later. There is nothing worse than sitting down to write a paper and not being able to find the notes you need to do your work. Keep all your notes for the class in one folder. Make sure your headings for each note tell you what the note is about. So instead of “Week 2 reading,” Use Author and Name of the Book or Chapter. You could even include topics or tags if that is helpful.
Write down now what you might need later. Consider that your future self, that person sitting down to write your final paper is stressed, has a lot on their mind, probably feeling rushed, so any extra leg work you can do now will help yourself out later. This means you should grab whatever resource links you think will be useful and add them to your notes. Make sure you have your bibliographic information so you don’t have to go hunting down a book that’s now been loaned out to another student! If you’re reading from a PDF, keep that PDF close to or linked to your notes. These little things can really save you time later.
Learn how to create great notes by following this order: