How to take notes in lectures

 When I first started university, I had no idea of what to expect from lectures. I did think that taking notes was an essential aspect of lectures, despite never really doing it for any other class before university - it just seemed like the done thing, although no one really explains how to do it properly. Everyone else must have felt the same, as every first year lecture was filled with people avidly taking notes as if their very life depended on it. I remember getting so flustered when lecturers moved on to a new slide too quickly for me to write it down, then looking around and seeing the same feeling on everyone else's face.

The thing is, there's really no need to copy lectures word for word because they usually get uploaded anyway. At my university - and I think most others are like this - lecturers use PowerPoint presentations to show their content for the session; these then get uploaded onto whichever website your university uses (ours was Blackboard). This has the down side of making a lot of students think that it's unnecessary to go to lectures as they can easily catch up with the work that they missed online, but often lecturers will mention interesting or important snippets of information that isn't on the slides as they're talking, so it's generally still worth going.

I think by the end of first year most people had realised that transcribing the lectures was a bit pointless, but taking notes can still be helpful if done correctly, even if you never look at them again and only use them as a tool to keep you focused on the lecture. Everyone will have a preferred method, but here are my tips for taking notes in lectures:

• If your lecturer uses PowerPoint and is delightful enough to upload them before the lecture starts, then print the slides off in the 'notes' or 'hand out' format so that you can take quick notes that relate to specific slides. Your notes might include key words, or things that your lecturer has emphasised for you to remember.
• If printing out the lecture isn't an option, then just take a notepad and either make a note of the slide number, heading, or some kind of page identifier so that you know which slide that your notes relate to. Again, just make a note of any extra information that isn't on the slides, or any hints that your lecturer gives you.
• I used to print off the lecture slides at a later date if I couldn't print them beforehand, then I'd pop them into a folder for that unit, and place any extra notes that I'd made behind it.
• You could try using a tablet or iPad as a different way to take notes as it's a quick and an easy way to keep things organised (as you could type directly into something such as Evernote, or save files to Dropbox). I wouldn't recommend taking your laptop to lectures however as they're quite bulky items to have to carry around, and I don't know if I'm talking for the majority here, but I found the sound of typing really distracting in lectures!