How to note: the blueprint

raisindetre @ Flickr
Architects don't plan for every brick, but without their blueprint work cannot begin.

You are a manager putting a team together for a job. There is a budget that restricts you from hiring all candidates. Therefore, you need to be selective.

You could pick names out of a hat. Bad idea: your team’s performance won’t be optimal.

You could hire people with the best grades. Not bad, but how do you know that grades correlate with performance on the job?

You could hire people with the best skills for the job. Very sensible. Of course, this means knowing what the job entails.

So it is with note-taking: you have a surplus of candidates – information – and a budget – limited time. Selection is required - and to do this optimally you need to know what 'the job entails'.

What this means is that before sitting down and even so much as opening a paper, you need to understand the key themes of the course, what it's about, the major idea(s) it's discussing.

Ploughing into your note-taking without this will mean you will be wasting time and memory on information that may be irrelevant.

Before doing anything I used to write this question:

WHAT IS THE POINT?

This isn’t some insight into my bleak emotional state during exams. Rather, asking ‘What is the point’ is a way to program your theoretical sat-nav, restricting access to routes you don’t need to visit and showing you the sorts of things to look out for.

You should be able to pack down a course’s themes into a page of notes, diagrams, photos, and maybe even videos if you are a digital monkey and then further into a few pithy sentences to remember. I called this the course blueprint.

Here are three examples of course themes (as I intuited them) from my final year:

Neuropsychiatry:
1) The brain is everything 2) The brain is not enough.

The metonymical conundrum means everything comes down to the brain (if attended to); all psychiatric disorders can be explained in neural terms (eventually). The second part means this is not enough: these disorders need to be explained holistically (genetic, neural, personal, social, cultural etc) in order to be fully understood and treated optimally.

Human Factors:
1) Know thyself 2) EEEEE

This means if we understand human capabilities and limitations (through psychology) we can design systems and products that are easier to use, easier to learn, more efficient, error-resistant and enjoyable.

Developmental Disorders:
1) Is language is an egg? 2) What flavour is it?

Here I was getting at the question of whether language was innate (an egg) or not. (Language is an omelette – a bit of nature a bit of nurture). The second question was about the flavour of language processing – domain specific or domain general (again, I think probably a bit of both).

So, stage one of note-taking: know what the course is about, don’t just plunge straight in trying to learn all the facts. Write it out. Reduce it down. Once that’s done you are ready to go off and actually do focused, useful, efficient revision.