How to Take Notes During a Lecture: 5 Methods and Tips

To take notes during a lecture, skim the slides or reading beforehand. In class, write the main ideas, examples and anything the lecturer stresses in your own words, not every sentence. Use one method that fits, such as Cornell or an outline, mark what you miss, and review your notes within a day to fill the gaps.

That holds for a college lecture in a hall of 300 and for an online class alike. The advice below draws on the note-taking guides of three university learning centres (Cal Poly, UNC Chapel Hill and UNSW Sydney) and on the published studies comparing laptops and handwriting, listed at the end. We make a note-taking app and say where it fits near the end; everything before that works with a pen.

A few minutes of preparation pay off in class: when you already know the outline, you can listen for what is new instead of trying to write everything.

• Check the week's topic in the syllabus or course outline and reread your last notes, as the learning centres at UNC Chapel Hill and UNSW both suggest.
• Skim the assigned reading for its main ideas, so the lecture fills in a structure you already know.
• If the slides are posted, download or print them and write your notes on them in class (UNSW).
• Head the page with the course and the date, and keep each course's notes together, in order (UNC).
• Sit near the front, where you can see and hear well (UNSW).

You are making a record of the ideas, not a transcript. UNSW tells students they do not need to transcribe the entire lecture, and UNC says it is okay if you cannot capture every main concept perfectly.

• Main ideas, definitions and examples, plus anything the lecturer stresses. UNC and UNSW list the clues: signal phrases ("to sum up"), repetition, a change in voice, and the opening and closing remarks.
• Short phrases instead of full sentences, with abbreviations and symbols you will still understand next week. Keep one list of the ones you use.
• Your own words, except for definitions, formulas and wording that has to be exact.
• Questions and anything you do not follow, marked with a "?" so you can ask later.
• Space. When you miss something, write a keyword, leave a gap and keep going. UNSW suggests filling in the details later.

Cal Poly's Writing and Learning centre describes five systems. None suits every course, so choose by how organised the lecture is and how fast it moves, then stick with one so your notes look the same every week.

Not sure where to start? Try Cornell: Cal Poly lists it for any lecture situation, and its layout builds in the review that makes notes useful. Our Cornell guide has a template to copy and a filled example.

• Switch to the sentence method: one numbered line per point, no structure needed. Cal Poly suggests it for lectures heavy with content that comes fast.
• Drop words, not ideas. A keyword or two per point is enough to rebuild it later.
• When you lose the thread, write "?" and the time, leave a gap and keep listening. Stopping to finish a sentence costs you the next point.
• Compare notes with a classmate after class to fill what you both missed.

• Get the slides before class if they are posted, and write on them (UNSW).
• Do not copy the slides. They are an outline, and UNSW warns against limiting your notes to them. Write what the lecturer adds: examples, reasons, and anything said about the exam.
• Put the slide number next to each note so the two match up when you review.

Many guides answer this with one famous study. Here is that study and the work that tested it again, as their abstracts report it:

Put together: if writing by hand helps, the advantage is small, and the studies disagree on whether it shows up at all. So pick the tool you can use well. On a laptop, close every other app (UNSW suggests closing all other programs) and resist what UNSW calls transcription mode: typing the lecture word for word. On paper, keep up with short phrases and leave space. Either way, review within a day.

UNC's comparison of the two is practical: handwriting is easier for diagrams and gives more focus if you are prone to digital distraction, while typed notes are faster, easier to edit and reorganise, and can be backed up, shared and searched.

Notes only help if you go back to them. UNC suggests returning to them ideally within a day or two, and UNSW suggests reviewing typed notes within 24 hours, while the lecture is fresh.

1. Fill the gaps you marked, from the slides, the reading, a classmate or a recording.
2. Expand abbreviations and fix anything you will not understand in a week (UNSW).
3. Write questions beside your notes, then cover the notes and answer from memory. That is the cue column of the Cornell method.
4. Write a summary of two or three sentences in your own words: what the lecture was about and why it matters.
5. List what you still do not understand and take it to office hours or the next class (UNC).

Before an exam, our guide to studying from recorded lectures picks up from here.

A recording catches what you missed, but it does not replace notes: deciding what to write is how you process the lecture, and a recording you never replay teaches you nothing. Ask first. Many universities need the lecturer's permission, and the law differs by country.

1. Ask the lecturer, check your university's policy, and see whether the course already posts recordings or captions.
2. Take notes as usual. When you miss something, write a "?" and the time shown on the recording, for example ? 31:40.
3. After class, go to that time, listen, and fill the gap in your own words.
4. Keep the recording for your own study, do not share it, and delete it when the course ends.

Already have a recording and want it as text? Our guide to transcribing a lecture covers that. And if a disability makes note-taking hard, ask your disability services office about note-taking accommodations.

Reline (we make it) records the lecture on your laptop and writes a live transcript as the lecturer speaks, in 60+ languages. In a hall it records the laptop microphone; for an online lecture it also records the computer's own audio (on a Mac, from macOS 13). It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux (beta), or in Chrome, and nothing joins an online class. Capture happens on your laptop; transcription, AI and storage run in the cloud.

You keep taking notes, on paper or typed into the same Reline note while it records, and the transcript panel shows the recording time for your gap markers. Afterwards, hover over a transcript line to see its time and press its play button to hear that moment again instead of the whole hour. You can also search the transcript for a term, or ask the note's chat a question and get an answer that quotes the transcript lines with their timestamps.

• No mobile app: you record on a laptop or desktop, not a phone.
• Free is 10 hours of transcription and up to 1 hour of recording per note, so a 90-minute lecture does not fit in one Free note, and 10 hours can run out within a term. Professional ($15 a month) lifts both limits.
• It transcribes only what it records live: it cannot import an audio or video file.
• In a hall, one laptop microphone hears everyone, so every line is labelled Me, unless you pick the beta Shared mic option: it numbers the voices it hears, and you name them yourself.
• If you type on the same laptop, its microphone hears your keyboard too. Type softly, or take notes on paper.

• Cal Poly Writing and Learning, "Note Taking Systems": writingandlearning.calpoly.edu
• UNC Chapel Hill Learning Center, "Effective Note-Taking in Class": learningcenter.unc.edu
• UNSW Sydney, Academic skills toolkit, "How to take notes": unsw.edu.au
• Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
• Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., and Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753-780. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2
• Urry, H. L., and colleagues (2021). Don't ditch the laptop just yet: a direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 plus mini meta-analyses across similar studies. Psychological Science, 32(3), 326-339. doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965541
• Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., and Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed versus handwritten lecture notes and college student achievement: a meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, article 78. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w