I got the title of this article from a piece of copy-writing shown on a notebook that I used in one of classes in junior high school. The piece of writing is so well written that anyone can understand from it the importance of note-taking and writing.
Personally and quite honestly, I am not a good note-taker. My hand-written letters or words are as big as my body size, thus making my writing very slow. In class back in high school, I would be the last person in my class to finish any note taking. Even though it was so, it did not stop me from note taking things that I see and hear. My note-taking philosophy is simple: I’d rather get little from my slow writing than nothing from my not writing.
I’d rather get little from my slow writing than nothing from my not writing.
Going to university, I started to see even brighter glimpse of the vitality of note-writing in my academics, which I am going to share with you in this article. It helped me with many things in many different ways as follows
1. Note lasts forever
To say that ‘note lasts forever’ may sound like I am over-claiming since the word ‘forever’ is an unlikely word to be achieved; people can easily lose or forget things that they have made or want to do.
If compared between note and memory, I guess you are able to point out the fact that things written on notes last longer than things stored in human brain or memory. Unless you lose your notes or unless it gets torn or burt, you will always be able to turn to them to see, add new points or make revision.
However, as for things in your memory, you can lose them at any second that you stop retaining them for use since your brain is bombarded with new things every minute, if not second. New things get into it, and due to its limited capacity, it has no choice but to abandon the old in order to take in the new.
2. Note-writing clarifies thoughts
I learned about this when I was an IFL’s sophomore. Then, I wrote down almost everything in my brain onto papers whenever I did any assignment, and this act helped me a lot to generate new ideas. How did it do so?
In my observation and experience, my brain functions in a more organized way when they are able to see something. The key word here is ‘see’, and it is something that you can do with/to your notes written during a particular event important or worth remember. Unlike thoughts in your brain that you can only visualize or imagine, you can see your notes on the papers representing thoughts having already been transcribed and somehow interpreted in your own way that you can understand. And if you are a good note organizer, you’ll be able to quickly see the pattern/themes of the thoughts on any topic you are working upon.
3. Note-writing makes thoughts seem more important
I’m not sure whether this can be applied to your case, but to me, whenever I’ve got to deal with any paper work, I always think of it as something important because writing just represents something official and serious. Note-taking raises your sense of value and importance toward the work you doing.
In my article How good students overcome procrastination, I wrote a point about ‘raising the value and importance of your work. It is generally true that people quickly take action on something only when they see its significance. To me, one of the ways to make your thoughts or things important is that you condition yourself to believe in its importance through writing. Believe me or not, you and I are lazy in writing; we only write when things are important. In reverse, to ensure that you write is to ensure that you see its importance.
4. Note-writing makes one remember thoughts longer
In “vocabulary’s accidental learning approach”, one can use any word comprehensively and correctly only after they have encountered with it as many often as 6 or 7 times.
This approach, I think, can also be applied to thoughts. In order to get yourself remember any thought longer, you’ve got to meet it oftentimes through reading of other people’s piece of writing or your piece of writing. So, by writing alone, you can already retain your thought two times (one in writing, and another in reading).
5. Note-writing helps manage thoughts well
Personally, I believe that the strongest reason that people should take notes or write down there down is because it helps them manage their thoughts well.
Brain is naturally made to function as a thinking engine, however it can’t manage thoughts. It may be able to create thousands if not millions thoughts but it has limited ability to manage those thoughts in a way that which one should come first and last.
In addition, if you don’t write your thoughts down, you’ll find it hard flaws in your thoughts. To analyze something somehow completely and accurately, one should list down their ideas in explicitly written words or draw diagrams of the ideas.
6. Note-writing allows other people to easily contribute their ideas
In contemporarily academic world, pair- or group-work is not a strange thing. Students are encouraged to work with one another to tackle any problem that is difficult if done on an individual basis.
Keeping your thought to yourself is not a good idea since only you know about what you think and other people know about theirs. In this sense, there is not synthesis of the ideas being discussed, maybe resulting in inconsistency of ideas or arguments.
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