How to Read and Take Notes

Most of what you will ever learn arrives as text, and most people read it the way they read a novel: start at the top, move to the bottom, highlight a few lines, and hope it sticks. It rarely does. Reading to learn is a different activity from reading for pleasure, and it can be done well or badly.

Notes have the same trap. It feels productive to write down what the author said, word for word, but a faithful transcript is a record of the text, not of your understanding. The reading and note-taking habits below are cheap to adopt and they change how much you actually retain.

Read actively, not passively

Active reading means doing something with the text as you go. Before reading, preview: skim the headings, first sentences, summary and any diagrams to build a rough map of where the argument goes. Then question: turn each heading into a question you expect the section to answer, so you read looking for something rather than drifting. After a section, look away and recite the gist in your own words — a small act of retrieval that reveals what you have not yet grasped. Highlighting and re-reading feel effective but are among the weakest study tactics precisely because they demand so little.

Notes should transform, not transcribe

The value of a note is in the work of making it. When you compress a paragraph into a phrase, restate an idea in your own words, or draw a link between two sections, you are forced to understand the material well enough to reshape it. A verbatim copy skips that step. This is why fewer, harder-won words often beat many easy ones: the constraint forces selection and summary.

Two systems that build the habit

SQ3R, introduced by Francis Robinson in his 1946 book Effective Study, gives active reading a sequence: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. The Cornell method, developed by Walter Pauk at Cornell University and popularised in his 1962 book How to Study in College, splits the page into a narrow left-hand cue column, a wider notes area, and a summary strip at the bottom — so review means covering the notes and recalling them from the cues. Both embed previewing, questioning and self-testing into a routine you do not have to reinvent each time.

You have a dense chapter to learn. Instead of reading straight through, you spend two minutes surveying its headings and summary. You rewrite each heading as a question — "What makes a market efficient?" — in a Cornell cue column. You read one section, then, without looking, write two lines of notes in your own words. At the end you cover the notes and try to answer the cue questions from memory, filling gaps only where you stall. The chapter took a little longer and you remember far more of it.

Structure can be overdone. Not everything you read deserves SQ3R and a cue column; a light article, a familiar topic, or reading purely for enjoyment needs none of it, and forcing the apparatus wastes effort. Elaborate colour-coded notes can also become a form of productive-feeling procrastination — decoration that substitutes for the harder work of recalling and using the ideas. The systems are servants of understanding, not ends in themselves.

In 2014, psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard" in Psychological Science. Across three studies, students watched lectures and took notes either by hand or on a laptop. Laptop users typed more words and, crucially, produced notes that overlapped more with the speaker's exact wording — closer to a transcript. On later questions testing conceptual understanding, the longhand note-takers tended to do better, and the effect persisted even when laptop users were explicitly told not to copy verbatim. The authors argued that writing by hand is slower, so it forces you to select and summarise — the transforming work that aids learning. One honest caveat: a 2019 replication led by Kathryn Morehead and colleagues found the longhand advantage weaker and less reliable than the headline suggests. The durable lesson is not "pens beat keyboards" but that notes which summarise beat notes that transcribe, whatever tool you hold.

• "Highlighting means I'm studying." Marking text is passive; it rarely improves later recall on its own.
• "Good notes capture everything the author said." Complete notes are usually transcripts; understanding comes from compression.
• "Handwriting is magic." The benefit is summarising under time pressure, not the pen itself — and even that finding is contested.
• "Reviewing is re-reading." Real review is testing yourself and filling gaps, not passing your eyes over the page again.

Take something you need to read this week. Before reading, turn every heading into a question. Afterwards, close the text and answer your own questions in writing — then check only where you were unsure.

Think Like a Maester: A note is worth having only when making it forced you to understand the idea.

1. What three active-reading moves should you make before, during, and after a section?
2. Why do notes that transform ideas beat notes that transcribe them?
3. What are the five steps of SQ3R, and who devised the method?
4. How does the Cornell layout build self-testing into review?
5. What did Mueller and Oppenheimer find, and what caveat should temper the conclusion?

Reading to learn is active: preview to build a map, question the headings, and recite in your own words. Notes earn their keep only when making them forces understanding — summarising, not copying. Systems like SQ3R and Cornell notes make those habits routine, and the longhand-versus-laptop research, caveats included, points to the same principle: transform, don't transcribe.

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