How to take lecture notes: before, during and after

The notes are not the point — what you do with them within a day is. A page written during a lecture is raw material; it becomes memory only when you go back, turn it into questions and answer them without looking. Almost everything that makes lecture notes useful happens either ten minutes before the lecture or twenty-four hours after it, and almost nothing about it depends on which method you use during. That is the opposite of how the advice is usually ordered.

The three stages

Most of the benefit is in the third one. If you only have time for one part of this, skip the preparation and do the after-pass.

Before — ten minutes

Skim the slides or the chapter and write three questions you expect the lecture to answer. This is not revision, it is scaffolding: a lecture you have a question about is one you listen to differently, and you will notice the answer arriving. It also tells you which parts you can safely stop writing down.

During — write less than you think

Transcribing is not note-taking. Aim to write the things that will not be on the slides: the example the lecturer made up on the spot, the aside about why a result is surprising, the thing they said twice. Leave a gap where you lost the thread rather than trying to catch up — a gap is a specific question you can answer later, which is more useful than a garbled sentence.

During — the notation that pays for itself

? = I did not follow this · !! = they said this matters · [ ] = check against the reading · → = this follows from that. Four marks, used consistently. When you come back the next day, the question marks are your to-do list and the double exclamation marks are the exam.

After — the twenty-four hour pass

Twenty minutes, within a day. Turn each block into a question you could be asked. Fill the gaps from the slides or a friend. Write three sentences at the bottom saying what the lecture was about. This is the entire method; everything before it is preparation for it.

After — test, do not reread

Cover the notes and answer your own questions out loud or on paper. Testing yourself beats rereading by a wide margin and the effect is one of the better-replicated results in the field — Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006, is the usual starting point. Rereading feels more productive because familiarity is easy to mistake for recall, which is exactly why people keep choosing it. If you do one thing on this page, do this one.

Handwriting against typing

You will be told handwriting is better, on the strength of Mueller and Oppenheimer, Psychological Science, 2014. That result has not held up: a large multi-lab replication — Urry and colleagues, Psychological Science, 2021 — reproduced the finding that typists transcribe more, but not the advantage on the test, and Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson, 2019, found no benefit either. The mechanism survives even though the result did not: writing by hand makes you summarise because you cannot keep up, and summarising is the part that works. Do it deliberately and the keyboard is fine.

Recording the lecture

Useful for filling gaps at a specific timestamp; a trap if it becomes a reason not to listen. The failure mode is obvious in hindsight: you record forty lectures, relisten to none, and have neither notes nor memory. Check your institution’s rules and ask — many lecturers are content and some are not, and it is their call.

If you have a disability or process audio differently

Ask about note-taking support rather than working around it privately. Many institutions provide it, recording permissions are often part of it, and the accommodation is usually quicker to arrange than people expect. What is available varies by institution, so ask yours.

Questions

What is the best way to take lecture notes?

Write less during, and do a twenty-minute pass within a day that turns the notes into questions you answer without looking. The during-method matters far less than whether that pass happens.

Should I handwrite or type lecture notes?

The study everyone cites for handwriting — Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014 — did not survive a large 2021 replication. What holds up is that summarising beats transcribing, and handwriting forces summarising only because it is slower. Type if you prefer, and summarise on purpose.

How do I take notes when the lecturer goes too fast?

Leave a gap and mark it, rather than trying to catch up. A marked gap is a specific question you can resolve from the slides in thirty seconds; a half-written sentence is usually unusable and you will not remember what it meant.

Is it worth recording lectures?

For filling specific gaps, yes. As a substitute for listening, no — the common outcome is forty recordings nobody relistens to and no notes either. Check your institution’s policy and ask the lecturer first.

How soon should I review lecture notes?

Sooner is better, and within a day is a workable rule — while you still remember enough to fill your own gaps. Leave it a week and the notes are no longer fixable, because you cannot reconstruct what you meant.

Is rereading notes a good way to revise?

It is popular and weak. Rereading creates familiarity that feels like knowledge; self-testing does not feel as good and works considerably better, which is among the more robust findings in the learning literature — see Roediger and Karpicke, 2006.

What should I do if I miss a lecture?

Get the slides, write your own questions against them, and answer what you can before borrowing anyone’s notes. Reading someone else’s notes produces recognition rather than recall, which is the same trap as rereading your own.

We make a recording pen, and the honest position is that it is not what most students need — the after-pass is, and it is free. See our note-taking methods page for choosing a format, and Cornell notes for the layout built around self-testing.