Study · guide

How to take good notes, and the four steps after the lecture

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 8 min read

The best-known answer to how to take good notes is a page divided into three areas — and the divisions are the part that travels. Go to the university that publishes the system and the layout turns out to be scaffolding for five numbered steps, only the first of which happens during the lecture.

That is the shape people copy. Here is what the same handout says to do with it.

Read down the right-hand labels and the system reorganises itself in front of you. Four of the five steps are after the event. Drawing the lines and filling the wide column is step one of five, and a page of notes that never got steps two to five is a transcript rather than a study method.

Step three is the one that does the work, and it is the one with a test built into it. Cover the notes; look only at your own questions; say the answer aloud in your own words. Everything you cannot say is a gap you have just found, at a moment when finding it is still cheap.

Step two explains why the cue column is narrow and empty during the lecture. The handout gives it one job: the questions you write afterwards, which is what turns a page of statements into something you can be tested on. Cornell’s own four reasons for it are worth keeping: clarify meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, strengthen memory.

A word about the one instruction in step one that people skip past. Telegraphic sentences. Not full sentences, not everything the lecturer said — the compressed form you would use in a telegram charged by the word. It is the only guidance the handout gives about what to write during the lecture, and it is guidance about writing less, which is the opposite of what a page of blank paper suggests.

A second university states the timing as a rule rather than as a step, which is worth having because the timing is the part people drop. The Learning Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in “Effective Note-Taking in Class”: “Part of good note-taking includes revisiting your notes a day or so after class. During this time, check for clarity, fill in definitions of key terms, organize, and figure out any concepts you may have missed or not fully understood in class.” On the handwriting question the same page is more careful than the paper title above, and the caution is the quotable part: “Research suggests that handwriting notes can help us learn and remember conceptual items better than digital notes.”

The last step is the one with nothing to enforce it. Ten minutes a week, on notes you already have, with no lecture and no deadline attached to it — which is an argument for giving it a time in the week rather than an intention.

The guides below take it four ways: the page itself, the four steps that come after the lecture, what to write while it is happening, and where the system came from.

Not covered here. It will not present the three-part page as the method. Cornell publishes five steps, and the page is where step one goes.

It will not tell you what the handwriting studies found. This guide has not read them; it reports that Cornell cites them, and their titles.

And it will not promise the system works for everybody. Cornell’s own module asks you to “assess which strategies work best for you in different situations”, which is a more honest framing than a method that claims to suit every subject. What holds instead is simple: the five steps and the origin of the system are quoted from Cornell University’s Learning Strategies Center, with a second reading from the Learning Center at UNC Chapel Hill.