Effective Note-taking Good morning, everyone! Today I'd like to continue our series of talks about study skills in university.This morning I'm going to discuss how to take notes effectively. As we all know, note-taking is difficult since spoken language is more diffused than written language and its organization is not immediately apparent. In addition, spoken language is quickly gone, which makes analysis difficult. So it can be seen that to achieve such a complex task as note-taking, a high level of ability in many separate skills is required. Now let's discuss these skills in detail. Before taking notes, prepare yourself mentally. Be sure of your purpose and the speaker's purpose. Review your notes and other background material if available because increased knowledge results in increased interest. Besides, a clear sense of purpose on your part will make the speaker's content more relevant. Be ready to understand and remember. Anticipate what is to come, and later evaluate how well you were able to do this. While taking notes, the student has to understand what the lecturer says as he says it. The student cannot stop the lecture in order to look up a new word or check an unfamiliar sentence pattern. This puts the non-native speaker of English under a particularly severe strain. Often he may not be able to recognize words in speech which he understands straightaway in print. He'll also meet words in a lecture which are completely new to him. While he should, of course, try to develop the ability to infer their meanings from the context, he won't always be able to do this successfully. He must not allow failure of this kind to discourage him, however. It is often possible to understand much of a lecture by concentrating solely on those points which are most important. But how does the student decide what is important? It is, in fact, the second skill I want to talk about today. Probably the most important piece of information in a lecture is the title itself. If this is printed beforehand, the student should study it carefully and make sure he is in no doubt about its meaning. Whatever happens he should make sure that he writes it down accurately and completely. A title often implies many of the major points that will later be covered in the lecture itself.