Study Tip: Boost Learning by Summarizing Your Notes

Effective note-taking is a skill that will help you in every subject you'll study in school, and while I'm not an evangelist of any one note-taking system over another, I do have one simple tip that will help you boost your learning, no matter what style of notes you take. That tip is this: summarize your notes.

Why? Well, as anyone with pages full of notes that stop making sense the day after class knows, notes have limitations. The simple act of taking them doesn't always guarantee retention. That's why it's important to summarize your notes.

The way you do it is simple. For each class lecture or reading for which you've taken notes, write a brief summary of your notes. Write it as if you're explaining what you've just learned to someone who wasn't in class that day or didn't do that reading: be clear, and don't assume that your imaginary reader is familiar with the class material. The summary doesn't have to be any particular length, just long enough to clearly and thoroughly cover whatever material you need to learn.

This works because it forces you to think about what you're learning and to express it in your own words. Many times, simply hearing something isn't enough to make it stick. When you have to explain something, you learn it better yourself.