How to: make effective revision notes

Hello, Reader!

Throughout my years of studying for exams, I have made hundreds of pages of revision notes. I’ll even go as far as to say: I have perfected my revision-note-taking skills since the (relatively) carefree GCSE Geography days. So I’m here today to help you through that process-- unfortunately, (although I wish I could,) I can’t save you your journey of finding your perfect revision note-taking technique simply because different things work for different people and for different subjects. For example; for A Level Maths I had a page per topic with all key info, whereas for A Level English I had a notebook with bullet point summaries of all of my texts, quote banks, historical studies, etc. The most important thing is that your notes are effective for you, so here are some things to take into consideration.

Firstly, you need to organise all this information that’s floating around your brain and your textbook and your class notes. The first thing to do is to find the main, key points of the topic. Can you split the topic into sections? Make the information as easy to skim through as possible; bullet point the concepts you need to understand or use spider diagrams, whatever works for you, but try to make the information really easy to swallow-- no intimidating blocks of text! Now that you have your key points, what are the important details? These are the things you have to memorise by heart. Dates, definitions, formulas, quotes, numbers, anything it might be. Some textbooks have these all ready for you at the end of the topic or the end of the book, others you might have to dig in a bit deeper. Lastly, the pieces of information you should look out for are the ones most easy to forget. This is pretty subjective. You might think that you already know the topic inside out, there’s nothing you could possibly forget- good for you! Reading through your notes and your textbook is a great idea to find those little pieces of content that have escaped you the first time. Maybe you can even find something extra that might get you those extra marks... it's worth a try. I almost forgot: before you start trying to organise the information, make sure that you ‘know’ all the content first. By this I mean, don’t try to make revision notes on a topic you haven’t finished in class yet, or you haven’t finished learning yet - when you do, you might find that there’s a huge key piece of information you’ve been missing or that the information which you thought was key was actually secondary. This, in itself, isn’t a problem because of course, you can just add on to your notes later-- but (in my opinion) the organisation of your notes is so important for them to be more effective and the information can only be organised “properly” when you can see the whole picture.

Organising the information you're given is only half the battle because now you have to actually put it into the notes. Don't worry, this is the fun part. This is where you figure out everything to do with your notes; what colour do I want to associate with this topic? What layout makes the most sense for this topic? Will this topic work best in a mindmap or in a page-full of bullet points? Which diagrams will I use and where? How will I order the information logically? Do I need examples? Where will they go and how will I separate them from the key info? For Maths, I gave each unit a different colour scheme, for example, Mechanics 1 would be red, so that when I revised a topic out of that unit, I automatically related it to the Mechanics part of my course and therefore I didn't confuse information from different units since they had separate exams. On the other hand, for English I gave each text studied a different colour so I could tell at a glance where notes on one text ended and the next began when flipping through/looking for something in my notebook. I've always preferred the bullet point/list style because I find that it looks cleaner and is easier for me to read. Another important thing: examples you use should be secondary to your main, keynotes- they are there to help you understand the concept if you're struggling to remember the method. I'll admit, I'm not sure how it works for some other subjects, but for Maths, try to make the examples serve as an extra, not the main event. I did this in my notes by writing examples of methods in a lighter pen colour so it was duller on the page relatively to my notes. 

Speaking of extras, your revision notes cannot be your one and only resource. Well, they can but they won't be as effective. I'm a huge advocate for revision cards which are super useful for things like the "important details" you need to memorise. How are revision cards different from revision notes? They should only include the information you actively struggle with remembering, or information that is most commonly forgotten, unlike your revision notes which will include all the content of the course- just summarised. You should have fewer revision cards the closer you get to the exam, as you will gradually have the specific information from the cards solid in your brain. 

You've got all these cute and functional revision notes (and revision cards) now- so how are they useful? Now, revising for exams, you will have all the information you need all in one place. If your notes are done right, you won't need your textbook or class notebook to revise; just your revision notes and past papers. This overview is helpful for spotting blind spots in your knowledge, which will be what your revision cards cover. Then, you can use your revision cards absolutely anywhere to memorise the information and eventually have no blind spots at all. Essentially, all of this is to help you become familiar and confident in the content. 

I hope that this post was helpful and that you can use some of my tips and techniques to form your own ideal revision notes. Happy studying!

Love, 

Agnes xo