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Guide Chapters
Have you been practicing your note-taking skills for English? In this post, we will go through the importance of writing English notes in Year 10, show you how to develop your notes and different strategies you can use to write notes.
It is important that you are continually developing your note taking skills and turning it into a habit, especially for English.
Let’s go through the reasons why.
Writing notes is not only useful in school, but it is an important lifelong skill. They have so many benefits that will aid you outside of school.
Making notes will:
Writing English notes will:
Writing English notes is an ongoing process that you will continue to develop throughout the year. Good English notes require numerous revisions and updates.
Let’s take a look at the four steps to making great English notes in Year 10.
It is important that you don’t write everything down your teacher says.
You won’t be able to keep up and you will have too much unnecessary information.
Instead, you should actively listen in class, try to understand the information and only write down:
Like your class notes, you need to be selective of what you are writing into your English notes.
These are some things you should take note of when you are reading your text:
Now that you have both your class and home notes, you need to collate them.
Remember, if you have any additional research, you should also add them into your notes. It is recommended that you search about your text (eg. context of author, context of text etc.) to have a deeper understanding of the meanings and purposes in your text.
By putting your English notes together into one document, it will be easier look through your notes and find what you need.
So how do we do this?
You don’t want to rest on your laurels.
Rather than try and run all year off one set of study notes, you need to produce a more streamlined version to prep for your exams.
Here are some tips you need to know before you produce your study notes:
The steps above will help you better comprehend your text and make sure you ace your next assessment!
Let’s put your note-taking skills into practice with our Year 10 English course!
In this course, you will sharpen your English skills and gain the confidence to ace Year 10 English!
Different strategies for making brilliant notes
There are many different ways to produce English notes.
Different people prefer different note-taking methods. And different note-taking purposes can influence which strategy you use.
Don’t feel as though you need to stick to one method. You can choose to use an outline method for class notes, and use tabulated notes when you do a comparison between texts.
Pick the note taking method that works for you and your purpose.
Let’s look at a few different strategies:
This is one of the most common and simple note-taking strategies.
How does it work?
Outlined notes are structured in a hierarchical order. There are titles, subtitles, dot points and sub-dot points where you can have more depth.
For English, you can structure your notes based on ideas and themes or chapters and acts.
Just remember that you still need to identify themes and ideas if you structure your notes based on chapters or acts.
Here is a SAMPLE structure of outlined notes.
Pros:
Cons:
Example:
Let’s examine these notes on Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Tabulated notes organise information in a table format.
How does it work?
Tabulated notes use columns and rows to categorise information.
When writing English notes, you can choose to sort your information in a variety of ways:
You should organise your tables so they will help you understand your English texts better.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples:
This table looks at Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’.
This student categorised their information by breaking down the analysis process.
Visual notes are based on visual elements.
How does it work?
Visual notes are notes that presents the information through images, symbols, boxes, charts and other visual elements.
This does not mean that there aren’t any words on the page… there are.
One bonus of visual notes is that when you write you are more likely to remember the information because you handwrite them.
Instead, these notes organise the information to make it look more appealing and use visual elements to compliment the words.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples:
A mindmap is a type of visual note.
How does it work?
Mindmaps basically consists of a centre bubble, with related points stemming off the centre bubble. You often use keywords or brief sentences when using a mindmap.
The centre bubble can consist of:
Pros:
Cons:
Examples:
Always go over your notes again, whether it be the next day or a few months later. Your learning is all about repetition, repetition, and repetition.
Don’t just write your notes and never return to them.
You have to make sure that you are constantly updating your notes and extending your knowledge. This is because…
having well prepared and organised notes will make your assignment preparation so much more easy.
Instead of stressing out, and flipping through 300 pages worth of text, you have a document with all the important techniques and key scenes.
Use your notes to develop your arguments, find techniques and see how they link to the ideas and themes.
Then, make a scaffold and plan out your response.
Having a good set of English notes will aid you in the final steps to analysing your texts.
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