Taking notes is a key part of every student's revision process. You go through your old material and make notes on the important things that you'll need to remember for exams. It's about as dull as life gets, making it super challenging to stay motivated and continue taking the notes. Well, the three tips in this article will make learning far more enjoyable, while also ensuring you're more likely to memorize what you're writing down!
Color-coded notes
A simple way to make note-taking more enjoyable is to color-code what you write. Use different colors to make things stand out, which will instantly make them seem more important and easier to remember. Also, it makes your notes a lot easier to read as everything is done in different colors, sectioning certain notes off from others. It's more enjoyable as it just looks nice! There's nothing more to it than that; when your notes look visually appealing, it makes you happy and you're almost encouraged to make more!
Make rhymes up
To really get creative with note-taking, you can start making up rhymes to help you remember things. This is super fun as you can almost make raps or poems that will help you make sense of different notes or key points. They stick in your head a lot better than just reading a paragraph from a page, and you can use a rhyming dictionary to really help you make some great rhymes. You won't be able to do this for every single note you take, but you can use this tactic to remember key notes that are almost guaranteed to show up in your exams. Trust me, studying is a lot easier when you add some creativity to the equation!
Use mnemonics
Mnemonics are memory devices that can add some serious spice to your note-taking. There are plenty of different types of mnemonic you can use, but we'll focus on the two most common:
Spelling mnemonics
Listing mnemonics
With spelling mnemonics, you are using a little sentence to help you remember how something is spelled. A common example of this is the word 'because', which you can remember by saying big elephants can always understand small elephants. You see, every word in the sentence aligns with the letter in the word. While most of you shouldn't have any issues spelling, this can help you if you are studying a foreign language and your spelling needs to improve!
Listing mnemonics are perhaps the best to use as they help you remember the order of things or a collection of things in a list. Again, the order of the planets is the best one to use as an example. You can create a little sentence like this: Many Vile Earthlings Munch Jam Sandwiches Under News Paper. Again, the first letter of each word aligns with the first letter of each planet, so you remember the order. This can be used across so many different topics to help you remember a collection of things.
Try adding these ideas to your note-taking and it will be more enjoyable to do, as well as easier to digest your notes and take them in.
