As a law student, you will be attending a lot of lectures and studying textbooks, journals, case notes and more. All of this information ends up being very hard to keep track of, especially material from lectures that you can’t go back to later. This means that you will need to have excellent note-taking skills for your work to be at its best, especially when it comes to revising for exams.
This blog post will look at why you need to take notes, how this helps you and how to use them to revise. We will also consider some dos and don’ts of note-taking and how to get the most out of them. There will also be another blog post looking at some of the different note-taking methods, so you have some ideas about what style to use.
Why Do You Need to Take Notes and How Do They Help?
Notes are vital to help you record and organise your knowledge. They act as a permanent reminder of the topics you have covered and should be divided up into sections to make it easy for you to find what you are looking for and revise from them. Your notes should be clear and concise to help with this.
Notes also help to link various ideas between topics, which will help with both revision and writing high-level answers, as it shows a better understanding of the issues. Even if you are writing an essay or taking an open book exam, notes will help to jog your memory and structure your answer.
In addition, the very act of note-taking itself helps you to remember. It is interactive, as you need to be summarising as you go and deciding what is important and what is not. It also helps to keep you focused on what you are reading or listening to, as you need to understand the words to be taking notes on them.
How Do You Revise from Your Notes?
When you write your notes, make sure you have divided them into sections, with headings or questions referring to them so that you can use these as a springboard for revision. You may decide to write your notes out again, using different words so that you remember them more.
Try covering the heading and writing what you can remember about it, then checking how you did. Keep going until you can consistently get the major points for all sections. Highlight important parts or annotate in any other way that will help you.
It may also help to go through your notes with the syllabus if you can get it. Doing this will help make your notes relevant to each topic you should be studying and provide a systemic method of revising. In addition, working through the syllabus in this way will highlight any areas that you don’t have notes for, allowing you to research and revise these areas before the exam.
What Should You and Shouldn’t You Do While Taking Notes?
In this section, we will be looking at some of the dos and don’ts of note-taking. To start with, one important thing you should do is review notes, ideally straight after taking them while they are fresh in your mind. Make sure that you understand what you have written and it is clear enough that you will still understand when you come back to revise the topic.
One way to check how good your notes are is to consider how confident you would feel explaining the topic to someone else, using just these. If you don’t think you could, consider what areas are missing and try to add them to your notes now. If you don’t know what is missing, ask! Talk to classmates or your lecturer to clarify what else is needed.
However, do keep taking your own notes, don’t just use someone else’s. Copying a classmate’s notes won’t help you to remember things in the same way that writing your own will, as you should be deciding for yourself what is important and how topics link to each other. Also, your notes should be structured in a way that works for you and is easy to revise from later.
This leads into the next do – picking a note-taking system. You might need to try out a few different ones at first to see what works for you, as everyone learns differently. Once you have found a good one, stick with this – don’t keep changing methods. This means that you will always know how your notes are structured, where to find things and can work out the best way of revising from them. We will be looking at some different note-taking methods in my next blog post.
However, don’t write down everything the lecturer is saying and all of the details of a case – this is not what note-taking is for. Instead, try summarising everything as you go along in a way that makes it quick to write, as well as clear enough for you to revise from later. There is no point wasting your time trying to write the lecture word-for-word.
Finally, make sure you do write down the important concepts of law, reasoning and any tests provided in the law. These are things that you may well need in an exam, so it makes sense to include them in your notes for revision. In addition, it helps to keep in mind the basics of the law when you later consider the finer points.
Wrapping Up
I hope that this helps you take notes in your legal lectures. Next time, we will be considering some of the note-taking methods you can use, so come back in two weeks for that!
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