Are you confident in your note-taking skills for Year 9 English? It is important that you master this skill in the early years of High School to build a healthy habit. In this article, we will show you how to write English notes for Year 9 that will help you nail your assessments.
Note-taking is the process of recording down information.
Your notes are meant to be concise and summarised information, not deep and complex paragraphs that run for pages.
In Year 9 English, you need to learn how to take effective notes in class and notes based on your texts.
It is easy to dismiss the importance of writing notes, especially in the early years of High School. You might think that it is a waste of time or that you can just revise your class books before exams.
However, note-taking has more benefits than you think.
At Matrix, students are taught a process to understand and analyse texts.
Writing notes help you understand your text better, and prepare you for the writing process. Let’s look at the benefits in more detail.
Note taking is basically recording down information. So why is this such an important step?
The key to memorising information is UNDERSTANDING and REPETITION.
Let’s see how repetition helps you remember your content.
When you write notes, you are revisiting what you already learned.
Spaced repetition is the process of revisiting your content after some time – whether it be a day, or a few months – to better remember your information and extend your knowledge.
This means that every time you revisit your notes and update them, you are slowly putting it into your long term memory!
Having notes prepared will make it A LOT easier to do your assignments and exams!
Imagine having to write an essay by next week, and you have to reread your whole novel to find techniques because you don’t have notes!
It would be a nightmare!
You see, notes can help your writing process in a number of ways. You can:
In High School English, you will find that you have to take notes for different purposes:
Let’s go through both methods.
These are the notes that you take in class!
<li”>Use shorthands and symbols to write faster (eg. without = w/out).
Make sure you remember them or it will make revising more difficult. To prevent this, write a key in your margin.
Let’s look at an example.
This is what class notes should look like. Rough but clear.
Let’s examine this:
Just remember, your class notes don’t need to look perfect.
Instead, make sure that you have all the important information written down.
When you go home, you should always read over your notes and elaborate on your knowledge.
Let’s have a look at an example.
These notes are very similar to the class notes. However, we can see straight away that it is just a copy and paste. That would just be a waste of time because copying and pasting doesn’t help you remember information.
Let’s further examine these notes. The student:
These notes are a result of multiple revisions and updates.
Some important rules for final notes are to:
We will discuss textual analysis in our next article, Textual Analysis in Year 9. But before you analyse your texts, you must know how to document your findings.
Let’s see how you should go about this.
These are notes that you make in the first reading of your text. You aim is to understand what is happening in the text.
Here’s an example.
Notice how everything is brief and rough. Your first reading is about understanding the text as a whole, not nitpicking it for techniques.
Let’s see what the student did. In their notes, they’ve:
These notes are made in your second reading. Your aim is to find meaning in the text.
To elaborate,
Let’s see what this looks like:
You can choose to either write your 2nd reading notes on a new sheet or update your initial notes.
This student chose to update theirs. So, let’s see what they did.
They’ve:
These notes are made in your third and subsequent readings. This is where you go into detail and nitpick the text. You can choose to type these or handwrite your notes.
Now that you know how to write notes in class and at home, it is time for you to put these skills into practice. If you’re looking for #studyspiration why not check out some other examples of notes on sites like pintrest?
Don’t worry! Gain key English skills with our Year 9 English Course.
There are many ways that you can organise your notes. Here is a brief overview of each some methods:
Here, the student has organised their analysis according to each scene and highlighted the theme.
It is important that your notes clearly show the themes and ideas because this makes writing preparation a lot easier.
This is an example of tabulated notes.
This student has organised their information according to ideas, technique, analysis and example. You can use a variety of formats to write tabulated notes. Choose one that works best for you.
This is an example of a mindmap.
You can make mindmaps of anything; an idea that stems out to examples, a theme with smaller ideas etc.
This student has created a mindmap in response to an assignment question. They focused on the keywords of the question and have smaller ideas stemming from it. They then give a brief explanation and examples.
Now that you know how to write effective study notes, let’s learn another important skill. Textual analysis!
In Part 2: Textual Analysis in Year 9, you will learn how to analyse texts, understand them, and critically analyse them.
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