How to Take Reading Notes

Contributor

By an eHow Contributing Writer

I want to do this!What's This?

Remembering what you read will help your schoolwork, and taking good reading notes will help you retain what you've read.

Difficulty: Moderately challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Highlighter Pens
• Index Cards
• Multicolored Pens
• Spiral Notebooks

1. Step 1

   Budget enough time for taking notes. The time you spend now will pay off down the line with less review time and increased retention.

2. Step 2

   Date your notes, and write full bibliographic information next to the date, including author, title, publication, date of publication, city, publisher, and volume number for journal articles.

3. Step 3

   Take notes in outline form to structure the material, and break it into related chunks and subchunks.

4. Step 4

   Use the structure of the book (or article) as the structure of your notes. For instance, chapters correspond to major headings, chapter sections to subheadings.

5. Step 5

   Note anything that is pertinent to the author's argument; try to avoid trivial minutiae. Important points tend to come in introductory and concluding paragraphs.

6. Step 6

   Distinguish facts from opinions, and quotations from summaries, in a way that will make it clear which is which when you review your notes.

7. Step 7

   Review your reading notes the next day, and do it again a few days later. This is a time-efficient way of retaining the material.