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• The most important piece of equipment at your disposal is your brain, so use it.

• Good notes begin by being alert, both physically and mentally.

• Concentrate on what's being said, and avoid talking to others, day dreaming or any other distractions.

• If necessary (and if possible), move to another part of the work area, or try and have the distractions reduced (i.e. talk to the teacher).

Typical components of learning a topic may be:

• introduction

• key points

• examples

• summary/conclusions

Notes are useless if you can't understand them after they have been written. Like all things, notes need to evolve.

• Leave space in your notes to enable supplementary information to be added at a later time.

• Emphasize important points, either by surrounding them with blank space, so the eye is drawn to them, writing them in different colours, or by using highlighting pens - whichever you think is more appropriate.

However don't over use highlighters, or else all your notes appear important and so lose their effectiveness. As a compromise, consider using different colours - I'd recommend no more than 3 - to give different degrees of importance.

How should the notes be arranged ? 

You could consider heading each new set of notes for a lesson by:

• subject
• date
• title of the notes - perhaps the name of the topic

You could consider heading notes from a book by:

• author
• name of the book
• date of publication and volume/edition
• page number(s)

Learn to use abbreviations, such as mathematical symbols. That way, you can spend less time writing and more time listening, reading and thinking. Some standard abbreviations are given in the table below: