The author or lecturer you are working with will have their own particular style and phrases that you should look out for, so become familiar with their signposts. Listen/look out for key phrases such as ‘the most important factor is…’ which is like a large signpost directing you to the fact that a vital piece of information is coming up and instructs you to ready your pen to take a note of it.

Therefore if you try to write down every word of a lecture or book then you will soon get behind and lose the thread of what is being presented to you. The whole point of note-taking is to be able to summarise information in a different, shorter form to use later. These can apply equally to taking notes from someone else’s verbal presentation or from a written text. However, it will be obvious to many people that they have not honed the skills needed to get maximum potential from their note-taking, so here are 10 tips on how to be an efficient and successful note-taker. Note-taking is a skill that we use in many walks of life: at school, university and in the world of work.

To make a note