How to Take Notes for Your Assignment? |LGAW01/06

by Admin Support October 27, 2015

How to Take Notes for Your Assignment?

Taking notes – Approach to writing an A+ grade assignment

Note taking is a very ancient scholarly form of art, even scholars in Shakespeare’s time used to carry a ‘table books’, just to portray themselves as ‘note takers’. In current academic standards, note taking is considered as a sign of a good scholar. From a strictly student perspective, note taking is highly recommended for planning your writing as well as structuring your assignment. Even, effective note taking habits will help you immensely to manage your time  and maintain your deadlines. In this regard, note taking is not only recommended for your assignment, however, you should be familiar of employing note taking as an effective strategy in terms of grasping any scholarly article.

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Why take notes?

  1. First of all, taking notes of lecture enhance your comprehension and retention capability. It is found in studies that if relevant information was contained in notes, then it had 34% more chance of retention.
  2. Lecture notes on research, article can actually clarify ideas not fully understood in the text or help elaborate on material that the text mentions only briefly.

Effective note taking skills: Effective note taking requires

  • Recognizing the main points
  • Identifying the piece of information relevant for your task
  • Having a system of note taking that works for you
  • Converting the information to note and diagram
  • Wherever possible, try to put the information in your own words
  • Keeping track of the source of information.

Note taking strategies:

  1. Be selective and systematic: As you take notes from a source, you should keep in mind that all the information might not be relevant for you. Rather, you should concentrate on the deciding between following purposes of your reading.
  • Are you reading it for general understanding or information?
  • Are you reading it for a specific information that may relate to an assignment or a topic?

Before you start to take notes, skim through the text and then highlight or mark the main points and any relevant information you may need to take note from.

  1. Identify the purpose and function of a text: Identification of the purpose as well as the function of a text helps you structure your note taking exercise. For this, you should be familiar with strategies to read a text critically.
    • First concentrate on the title and abstract.
    • Read the introduction or first paragraph.
    • Skim through the text to take note on the topic heading and to understand the structure of the article.
    • Follow the graphic materials (figures and tables) to predict its purpose in the article.
  2. Identify how information is organized: Most text employs a range of organizing principles to structure the arguments. Organizing principles tend to sequence information in a logical hierarchy, some of which are:
  • Past ideas to present ideas.
  • The steps or stages of a process.
  • Most important points to least important point.
  • Simple ideas to complex ideas.
  • General ideas to specific ideas.
  • The largest parts to smallest part of something.
  1. Include your own thoughts: In note taking exercise you should also pay attention to include your own thought about the text. However, for this you should record it in a separate column so that you don’t get confused later on.

The following note taking check-list can help you immensely to ensure that taken notes are comprehensive.

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(Source: http://tutorials.istudy.psu.edu/notetaking/notetaking_print.html)

As a final remark, it can be highlighted that note taking exercise at times can be found a very rigorous and time-consuming process. However, considering the benefit of the exercise you should not hesitate to invest any amount of time it demands. Except note taking, you should be familiar with other different steps of completing assignments for ensuring good grades.

If you really find difficult to find some time to read all these steps and complete your assignment, then there are various top assignment help services to help you. You can just approach these assignment providers and give your requirements to them. They will come back to you with the best assignment services.

 

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