Library Subject Guides
Tips on note-taking applications, making and organising notes, and annotating electronic texts:
Note taking can be active or passive. In other words, active notes include your own thoughts, words, and questions, meaning that you are already engaging with the material and not just copying it out. This quiz will help you to identify what is active and what is passive note taking so you can think about how you take notes and what you could improve.
For each note taking example, choose whether it is active or passive. Click on the "Next" arrow to begin.
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Well done. You got of 6 questions correct.
Now that you've taken the quiz, think about how you take notes. Do you use more of the active or the passive techniques that were listed?
If you use more of the passive note taking techniques, you're less likely to remember things you learn, so you may end up doing more checking of your notes when writing assignments or revising. Try out some more active learning approaches such as those found in this quiz and check the note taking guide for more handy tips.
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Good note-making will help you to get the most from lectures and taught sessions:
This video provides four approaches to creating notes: linear written notes, annotated slides, mind maps and an introduction to the Cornell note-taking method.
There's more resources available to help you think about ways of studying and how you engage with lectures and other teaching sessions:
Taking notes isn't just about what notes you take...it's also about where you take them.
There's no best place to take and store your notes. What is important is that you find an approach that works for you, ensuring that you can find your notes again when you need them and can access them however you want to. You might find one particular application is good for you, or you might use a combination of apps for different purposes, or use a notebook and an app, or even just use a notebook. We'll look at the features of some note-taking apps available at the University of York, but you may find other ones that suit you better.
Keep is Google's note-taking application. You can log into Keep in a web browser at keep.google.com or use the Keep apps for iOS and Android to use it on your phone or tablet.
Key features of Google Keep:
Google Keep is good for short notes or for making handwritten or spoken notes, particularly on the go. You might use it together with Google Docs, by making brief notes in Google Keep and then copying them to Google Docs to write up more fully or add other content.
OneNote is part of Microsoft Office and is a tool that allows you to create notebooks of notes, adding pages and formatting and using various Microsoft Office functionality. It has mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as a desktop app and a web version, but your access may depend on what kind of Microsoft Office access you have. To use OneNote if you have Microsoft Office downloaded via the University of York's Office 365, you will need to sign up for a free personal OneDrive account to use it, as OneNote now only works if you can save the files to OneDrive.
Here are some of the features of OneNote:
In the resources for our Taking note of note taking applications session, we showcase some online note taking applications, looking at how you can annotate PDFs and other online documents to be efficient with you note taking.
View full Taking note of note taking applications slides on Google Slides.
Take a look at the above link to see a couple of examples of note-taking using a tablet and stylus.
Grid notes is a useful note taking technique for assignments where you need to compare and synthesise information from numerous sources. You collect information under specific headings in a grid or table, which helps you to:
Find out more:
| et al. | and others | c. | approximately | ∵ | because | ∴ | Therefore | cf. | compare | ↘ | decreases, falls | ↗ | grows, increases | = | equal to | ≡ | equivalent to | > | greater than | < | less than | ← | results from | → | results in, leads to | " | same as above | ≈ | similar to | esp. | especially | N.B. | Important | i.e. | that is to say, in other words | pp | pages | e.g. | for example | v | very | re | with reference to |
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