How to Take Notes | Tips & Cornell Notes

Knowing how to take notes effectively is a core academic skill, but it’s one that we’re sometimes never explicitly taught. Good note-taking isn’t about writing down everything you hear or read—it’s about selecting, organizing, and engaging with information in a way that supports understanding and long-term learning.

This article discusses how to take notes in school or college and introduces the popular Cornell note-taking method.

How to take good notes

Most of us probably start taking some kind of notes automatically when we’re listening to a teacher or professor in class or reading a text for an assignment. But to really answer the question of how to take good notes, it helps to consider why we take notes in the first place.

Writing, underlining, highlighting, and even doodling while listening or reading can help you stay focused and remember information. These are useful study techniques, but good notes are more than that. Good notes are a resource you can return to later—not jottings that become meaningless once the session ends, and not large amounts of copied information from slides or a text. Instead, the goal is to create a clear record of your individual learning experience—something that doesn’t already exist on your professor’s slides or in the books on your reading list—that you can revisit to continue learning, studying, or developing ideas.

In academic settings, you usually take notes to:

• Create a personal record of what you’ve learned in a class or lecture—one that helps you engage during the session and review the material afterward as part of an ongoing course of study
• Record key information and ideas while completing assignments or research papers, using resources such as books, journals, or videos in a form that you can review and build on later

For these purposes, good notes:

• Don’t interfere with your ability to absorb information and understand concepts while listening or reading by requiring you to write down too much
• Include enough detail to serve as a clear, personalized record that’s useful after the class or study session
• Support concentration and active learning during the class or study session
• Help you identify gaps in your understanding and highlight areas that need further study or research

The Cornell note-taking system is designed to help you take notes that meet all of these goals. It’s an excellent starting point that you can adapt over time to suit your learning preferences and academic needs.

How to take Cornell notes

Cornell notes, also known as the Cornell note-taking system, are a structured method of taking notes aimed at high school and college students. The system was developed in the 1950s by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University, and is designed to help you take more useful notes during classes and study sessions in a way that supports your overall learning.

Using the Cornell note-taking method encourages you to:

• Record the right amount of information while listening or reading (not too much and not too little)
• Analyze and evaluate ideas during or after a lecture or study session, rather than simply copying facts or sentences (e.g., from a professor’s slides)
• Create an effective study resource you can review to learn key concepts, retain important information, and make connections across individual lectures in a course or chapters of a book

To use the Cornell method, divide each page of notes into three sections: the notes column, the cue column, and the summary.

Notes column

The notes column is the largest section of the page. This is where you write down key information during a lecture, meeting, or reading session.

Here, you should focus on

• Main ideas and key points
• Important details you’ll likely need to remember (for example, for exams or assignments)
• Brief explanations or examples

The goal is to capture just enough detail to help you recall the content later—not to write everything word for word. Your notes only need to include enough information to make sense when you review them shortly after the session, ideally on the same day. Writing down too much detail during a class or study session can prevent you from fully engaging with what you’re listening to or reading. Instead, add detail to your notes during review, a process that can itself help reinforce what you’ve learned.

Cue column

The cue column is used for questions, keywords, and comments that help you engage more deeply with your notes. You can fill this section in during the lecture or reading session, or afterward as part of your review process.

In the cue column, you might write:

• Questions that target key concepts (e.g., “Why did the Romans leave Britain?” or “Is Python a high- or low-level programming language?”)
• Important terminology you think you’ll need to understand or use correctly (e.g., in an essay)
• Potential test or exam questions

Depending on your learning style, using the cue column while you’re taking notes—as well as afterward when you’re reviewing them—can help you stay focused and process what you’re listening to or reading more deeply.

Summary

The summary section, located at the bottom of the page, is where you write a brief overview—usually just a few sentences—of what you learned during the session. You can fill this in afterwards when reviewing your notes or at the end of the session. If you do it at the end of the session, it’s a good idea to revise and improve it when you review your notes.

Condensing your notes into a brief summary like this helps you:

• Reinforce your understanding of the main ideas
• Identify connections between different lectures, topics, or sources
• Improve long-term retention by reviewing and synthesizing information soon after learning it

How to take Smart Notes

How to Take Smart Notes is a book by Sönke Ahrens that explains a system for taking, organizing, and distilling notes, originally developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

In this system, smart notes are notes that capture your own understanding of an idea and are stored in a card file, called a Zettelkasten in German. You don’t write these notes right away. Instead, you write them after a filtering step, where you review the “quick notes” you’ve written to capture passing thoughts and rough ideas, along with notes taken from books, articles, or other sources. Using these temporary notes, you rewrite the most valuable ideas into permanent smart notes, which you store in the Zettelkasten.

Each smart note focuses on a single, clear idea. They are deliberately concise and link to related notes using references and keywords. Over time, these links grow into a network of ideas that Ahrens believes deepens understanding, sparks new insights, and makes writing articles, essays, or even books easier.

Frequently asked questions about how to take notes

How should I take notes from a textbook?

The best way to take notes from a textbook depends on why you’re reading it.

If you’re reading to answer specific questions for an assignment or paper, structure your notes around those questions. Use clear headings for each one to record the information that helps you address them.

For more general reading, keep these principles about how to take notes in mind:

• You don’t need to write down everything. Aim to record enough information to understand your notes later, but not so much that it interferes with actively engaging with the text.
• Review and expand your notes on the same day—or the next day—while the material is still fresh. This helps reinforce understanding and improve retention.
• Writing a short summary during review can clarify main ideas and support the learning process.

If you return to your notes later and find parts of them unclear, QuillBot’s free AI Chat can help you interpret and clarify ideas you no longer fully understand.

How should I take notes in college?

How you take notes in college depends on both the purpose of your note-taking and your personal learning preferences.

When taking lecture notes, write with the intention of reviewing them soon afterward. Revisiting your notes after class—adding details and clarifying unclear points—helps reinforce key concepts and improves retention for assessments such as exams and assignments. It also makes it easier to understand later lectures that build on the same material.

Try to avoid writing down too much during class so you can stay engaged with the lecture. At the same time, your notes should include enough information to be meaningful when you review them later.

When preparing for an exam, you can also use QuillBot’s free AI Chat to generate practice questions based on your lecture notes, helping you test your understanding and identify gaps in your knowledge.

Are handwritten notes better?

Whether handwritten notes are better than typed notes depends largely on your learning style and how you use them. There is no definitive, conclusive evidence that one method for taking notes is better for all learners or all situations.

Some studies suggest that handwriting can encourage deeper processing because it makes it harder to write everything down verbatim, while typing can be more efficient for capturing large amounts of information. However, both methods can be effective when used thoughtfully.

The best approach is to experiment with handwritten and typed notes in different contexts and see which helps you stay engaged, understand the material, and review it more effectively.

One advantage of typing your notes is that they’re easy to use with tools like QuillBot’s free AI Chat, allowing you to quickly copy and paste your notes to generate practice questions or review key concepts when preparing for exams.