Listening and note-making

Know the purpose of the lecture

Identify the main points

Make effective notes

Realated pages:

At the start of every year, new students come to the Study Skills Centres worried about how they will keep up in lectures. This page provides fact sheets that will help you improve your listenting and note making skills, to make sure you get the best out of lectures and other similar situations.

10 bad listening habits

This fact sheet taken from Ralph Nicholl's The Supervisor's Handbook provides tips for avoiding 10 bad listening habits:

Calling the subject dull
Criticising the speaker
Getting over stimulated
Listening only for facts
Trying to outline everything
Faking attention

Tolerating distraction
Choosing only what is easy
Letting loaded words get in the way
Wasting the differential between thought and word-speed

Download and read 10 bad listening habits.

Learning by listening

Some more tips, in list form, for getting the most from your lectures such as:

Determining why, what the speaker is saying, is important to you
Looking for structure - how is the speaker getting to the main pint of the lecture?
Stopping your mind from wandering

For more information, download Learning from listening.

Symbols and abbreviations

The art of making notes in a lecture is to note down only the important facts (see the fact sheets above). You can also speed you note-making up by using symbols and abbreviations such as:

= (equals)
< (smaller than)
> (larger than)
� (leads to/results in/causes)
e.g. and i.e. ('for example' and 'that is')
c.f. (compare)

Download the Symbols and Abbreviations sheet for more details to make your note making faster and consistant.

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Listening and note-making