Cornell Note-Taking
Cornell Note-Taking
Transcript
How do you take notes? I want you to think about this question as we move into our next exercise. I'm going to give a brief lecture on literary history, and I'm going to ask you to take some notes. The tasks are simple: first, listen actively and carefully, and second, take notes as you would if you were sitting in a college classroom.
Get out your laptop, get out your pen and paper, and let's get started. I'm starting today with an admission because even though, I'm talking about Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" I'm a Victorianist by training. I studied the 19th century novels of Britain, but I do have a soft spot for this text because it's funny.
The text is written somewhere between 1387 and 1400, so we're at the end of the 14th century in England and it's written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was a poet, he was a writer, he was an author, but he was also a bureaucrat, he was also a diplomat, and he was also a courtier. In fact at the height of his career, he worked as the Clerk of the King's Works which essentially means he oversaw royal construction projects for the king. It was a job of tremendous responsibility, he had a lot to do, he had a lot of power. It also indicates to us that he was in the king's tightest inner circle. He would've been one of the king's most trusted folks and so writing this text, we know would've been something he would've done for the court to entertain and to amuse his peers. Canterbury Tales is considered his magnum opus, it's considered his greatest work, and the text is an interesting text in that it's 24 short stories put inside of a frame narrative. A frame narrative being a group of people who are traveling from London to Canterbury on a religious pilgrimage and these stories are the stories that they tell each other to keep each other entertained and amused.
The thing to know about the Canterbury Tales from a linguistics perspective is that it is written in English, but English isn't even necessarily the only language in England at this time. In fact, there are three competing languages that are sort of bullying each other for space at this particular moment and those languages are Latin, French, and English. Latin at this particular moment is the language of the church, the language of the Roman Catholic church of which England is still very much a part, and as a result, all religious activities, all religious exercises, and most scholarship is conducted in Latin, and people of the higher class, people in the upper echelon would've been learning to read and to speak Latin from the very earliest ages. French at this time would've been the language of the English court.
This is counterintuitive, of course, because it's the English court, you might expect English to be the language of the English court, but William the Conqueror who came to England in 1066 was Norman, and he brought Norman French with him and that Norman French is still the language of the English court at this time, that means that courtly activity, diplomacy and most artistic production for the court is going to be again, counterintuitively in French rather than in English. English in England at this time is what we call the vernacular. The vernacular is the language of common people, the language of everyday folks, so butchers, bakers, business people, people who are raising their children in England are speaking what we would call now Middle English or Late Middle English.
And it's different from Modern English in that it sounds really different. There are some grammatical constructions that are different but for us, it really sounds quite different, and that's because at this particular moment, English is being spoken before the great vowel shift, which takes place between 1350 and 1700. This is when those European vowels, ah, eh, ee, oh, ooh over the course of about 400 years become the modern vowels, A, E, I, O, and U. So a word like "care," which we pronounce care, would have been pronounced car-eh. There are also some really fun little idiosyncrasies of Middle English, one being that the silent K is pronounced, so the word "knight" where we actually make the K silent and we use the I, is pronounced kin-eeght. Kin-eeght.
So it's kind of neat, and I'll read a little bit of Middle English later for you so that you can really hear how it sounds. So we know that at this particular moment, English is spoken by common people but the Canterbury Tales is a text that's produced for the court, so you would expect it to be in French, and what's really cool about the Canterbury Tales is Chaucer makes the artistic, and I would argue, the political decision to compose it in English. To compose it in the vernacular for the court. Now this is important for literary scholars for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's popularizing the English vernacular as a language that's possible to use for artistic production.
Again, we don't know that this text is necessarily seminal in the evolution of English as an artistic language but we know, given the sort of popularity of the text, that this is a really important moment. It's also a move a little bit toward the democratization of art at this particular moment, working people, poor people would only have access to stories through the stained glass windows in their churches and the stories they would tell each other at home. In this particular case, even though working people are still illiterate, they're not able to read and write, were they to hear this story read, they would be able to understand it, which is actually pretty extraordinary at this particular time. So let me read a little bit of this language to you so you can really hear what it sounded like.
Again it's actually quite elegant, you will notice places where it sounds a little bit like Modern English, you'll notice some places where it sounds French, even some places where it sounds a little bit like Modern Welsh, and this comes from the prologue of the Canterbury Tales, the very, very opening. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, "the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote "and bathed every veyne in swich licour, "of which vertu engendred is the flour. "Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth "inspired hath in every holt and heeth "the tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne "hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne. "Smale fowles maken melodye, "that slepen al the night with open ye "so priketh hem nature in hir corages." "Smale fowles maken melodye" little birds make melodies. "Smale fowles maken melodye "that slepen al the night with open ye" that sleep all night with open eye, that never go to sleep at night, "so priketh hem nature in hir corages" because nature pricks them in their heart to do so, really, really cool stuff. Okay.
Take a look at the notes that you just took. I want you to ask yourself three questions about those notes. First, how did you organize your information? Second, how did you know what information was more important than other information?
And finally, did you write everything down? And if not, why not? The notes that you see here are notes that were taken about the lecture that I just gave in accordance with something called the Cornell Note Taking Method. Here's what the Cornell Note Taking Method does: it takes a sheet of paper and it splits it up into three basic spaces. The primary space, the major space, is for the notes. It's essentially the way that you would take notes normally, you fill it with the most important information, key concepts, and evidence. Then there's a small column at the bottom called the summary column.
This column is where you try to capture the main idea, the primary significance of those notes. And then over to the right or the left, you see a cue column. The cue column is meant to be filled with questions that help cue you to the information that you've provided. The cue column is essentially a self test that you create and put in your own notes.
So if we go back to the lecture I just gave, here you can see in the body of the notes section most of the information that's provided, and you can see small little arrows put next to things of significance. In the bottom you see a summary of the notes, and over on the left-hand side you see some questions that might appear on an exam based on this material or questions that you should be able to answer without looking at your notes if you know the information well. In fact, one really useful thing about Cornell Notes is if you cover the body of your notes, you can use your cue section as a kind of self test.
Here's another rendering of the Cornell Notes in layman's terms. You have your raw lecture notes section, you have your quiz column, that's where you're going to put your questions, and then you have a quick summary at the bottom. That summary also serves as a kind of index, so that you can find out very quickly what the notes are about. Here's another set of notes done according to the Cornell Note Taking System on female hysteria. And again if you look carefully, you can see the primary information in the main body, you see a summary of the main points at the bottom, and you see a set of questions on the side.
Again, if you know the information in your notes well enough, you should be able to answer those questions without the aid of the notes that you took in the body section. Now I wanna be clear about the Cornell Note Taking System. It's a fairly rigid system, and it's difficult to do it all the time for all of your courses. In fact, Cal Newport, who's the author of the blog Study Hacks, says that he thinks it's a little bit too strict of a method to use all the time that it becomes a little bit too onerous for students to use. The one thing I wanna say counter to that is that while it's true that it is a strict format, and while it's true that you may only use some parts of the system and not others, the true value of the Cornell Note Taking System is not in its actual structure, it's in what this structure requires the note taker to do. It requires the note taker to listen carefully during lecture, and listen attentively so that they can fill the body section of the notes. It then asks them to reengage that material to complete the summary column at the bottom, identifying all of the main ideas, key concepts, and most important information. It then requires that the student reengage the material yet again to formulate questions about the material to help cue the information in their mind or to serve as a study guide or even a self test later in studying.
What this means is that the Cornell Note Taking System requires the student in the moment of taking notes to engage the material multiple times for multiple different purposes, and we know for a fact that this is going to increase comprehension and retention, so even if you don't adopt the system in its entirety and even if you don't take all of the pieces, what you should attempt to do is to keep the spirit of the system in your note taking. Listen carefully, summarize, and then question.
Once you take your Cornell notes, you should review them regularly, don't put them away and never look at them again until the exam. Once or twice a week is usually a good bet until you have that material more or less under your mastery. Then you want to use your notes to develop sample questions and again if you're doing the Cornell Note Taking System, you're doing that as you take notes in your cue column.
You might also wanna take your notes and put them up against the notes of other students in the course. This allows you to do two things, one, it allows you to see if other students thought things were important that you didn't think were important, and it allows you to judge the quality of your notes, and two, it allows you and your colleagues to test each other before the test tests you. You can also loan your notes to a friend and when they give them back, just make sure that you ask for feedback on your notes.
It's always important for someone who's not you to tell you how they experienced your notes and how you might be able to make them better. And finally, save them. You never know when your notes for one course are going to come in helpful in another course. And as always, remember: if you have a note taking system that's like this or if you use this exact note taking system or if you have a totally different note taking system that works for you and you're getting the results that you want, keep doing it.
Get out your laptop, get out your pen and paper, and let's get started. I'm starting today with an admission because even though, I'm talking about Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" I'm a Victorianist by training. I studied the 19th century novels of Britain, but I do have a soft spot for this text because it's funny.
The text is written somewhere between 1387 and 1400, so we're at the end of the 14th century in England and it's written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was a poet, he was a writer, he was an author, but he was also a bureaucrat, he was also a diplomat, and he was also a courtier. In fact at the height of his career, he worked as the Clerk of the King's Works which essentially means he oversaw royal construction projects for the king. It was a job of tremendous responsibility, he had a lot to do, he had a lot of power. It also indicates to us that he was in the king's tightest inner circle. He would've been one of the king's most trusted folks and so writing this text, we know would've been something he would've done for the court to entertain and to amuse his peers. Canterbury Tales is considered his magnum opus, it's considered his greatest work, and the text is an interesting text in that it's 24 short stories put inside of a frame narrative. A frame narrative being a group of people who are traveling from London to Canterbury on a religious pilgrimage and these stories are the stories that they tell each other to keep each other entertained and amused.
The thing to know about the Canterbury Tales from a linguistics perspective is that it is written in English, but English isn't even necessarily the only language in England at this time. In fact, there are three competing languages that are sort of bullying each other for space at this particular moment and those languages are Latin, French, and English. Latin at this particular moment is the language of the church, the language of the Roman Catholic church of which England is still very much a part, and as a result, all religious activities, all religious exercises, and most scholarship is conducted in Latin, and people of the higher class, people in the upper echelon would've been learning to read and to speak Latin from the very earliest ages. French at this time would've been the language of the English court.
This is counterintuitive, of course, because it's the English court, you might expect English to be the language of the English court, but William the Conqueror who came to England in 1066 was Norman, and he brought Norman French with him and that Norman French is still the language of the English court at this time, that means that courtly activity, diplomacy and most artistic production for the court is going to be again, counterintuitively in French rather than in English. English in England at this time is what we call the vernacular. The vernacular is the language of common people, the language of everyday folks, so butchers, bakers, business people, people who are raising their children in England are speaking what we would call now Middle English or Late Middle English.
And it's different from Modern English in that it sounds really different. There are some grammatical constructions that are different but for us, it really sounds quite different, and that's because at this particular moment, English is being spoken before the great vowel shift, which takes place between 1350 and 1700. This is when those European vowels, ah, eh, ee, oh, ooh over the course of about 400 years become the modern vowels, A, E, I, O, and U. So a word like "care," which we pronounce care, would have been pronounced car-eh. There are also some really fun little idiosyncrasies of Middle English, one being that the silent K is pronounced, so the word "knight" where we actually make the K silent and we use the I, is pronounced kin-eeght. Kin-eeght.
So it's kind of neat, and I'll read a little bit of Middle English later for you so that you can really hear how it sounds. So we know that at this particular moment, English is spoken by common people but the Canterbury Tales is a text that's produced for the court, so you would expect it to be in French, and what's really cool about the Canterbury Tales is Chaucer makes the artistic, and I would argue, the political decision to compose it in English. To compose it in the vernacular for the court. Now this is important for literary scholars for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's popularizing the English vernacular as a language that's possible to use for artistic production.
Again, we don't know that this text is necessarily seminal in the evolution of English as an artistic language but we know, given the sort of popularity of the text, that this is a really important moment. It's also a move a little bit toward the democratization of art at this particular moment, working people, poor people would only have access to stories through the stained glass windows in their churches and the stories they would tell each other at home. In this particular case, even though working people are still illiterate, they're not able to read and write, were they to hear this story read, they would be able to understand it, which is actually pretty extraordinary at this particular time. So let me read a little bit of this language to you so you can really hear what it sounded like.
Again it's actually quite elegant, you will notice places where it sounds a little bit like Modern English, you'll notice some places where it sounds French, even some places where it sounds a little bit like Modern Welsh, and this comes from the prologue of the Canterbury Tales, the very, very opening. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, "the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote "and bathed every veyne in swich licour, "of which vertu engendred is the flour. "Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth "inspired hath in every holt and heeth "the tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne "hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne. "Smale fowles maken melodye, "that slepen al the night with open ye "so priketh hem nature in hir corages." "Smale fowles maken melodye" little birds make melodies. "Smale fowles maken melodye "that slepen al the night with open ye" that sleep all night with open eye, that never go to sleep at night, "so priketh hem nature in hir corages" because nature pricks them in their heart to do so, really, really cool stuff. Okay.
Take a look at the notes that you just took. I want you to ask yourself three questions about those notes. First, how did you organize your information? Second, how did you know what information was more important than other information?
And finally, did you write everything down? And if not, why not? The notes that you see here are notes that were taken about the lecture that I just gave in accordance with something called the Cornell Note Taking Method. Here's what the Cornell Note Taking Method does: it takes a sheet of paper and it splits it up into three basic spaces. The primary space, the major space, is for the notes. It's essentially the way that you would take notes normally, you fill it with the most important information, key concepts, and evidence. Then there's a small column at the bottom called the summary column.
This column is where you try to capture the main idea, the primary significance of those notes. And then over to the right or the left, you see a cue column. The cue column is meant to be filled with questions that help cue you to the information that you've provided. The cue column is essentially a self test that you create and put in your own notes.
So if we go back to the lecture I just gave, here you can see in the body of the notes section most of the information that's provided, and you can see small little arrows put next to things of significance. In the bottom you see a summary of the notes, and over on the left-hand side you see some questions that might appear on an exam based on this material or questions that you should be able to answer without looking at your notes if you know the information well. In fact, one really useful thing about Cornell Notes is if you cover the body of your notes, you can use your cue section as a kind of self test.
Here's another rendering of the Cornell Notes in layman's terms. You have your raw lecture notes section, you have your quiz column, that's where you're going to put your questions, and then you have a quick summary at the bottom. That summary also serves as a kind of index, so that you can find out very quickly what the notes are about. Here's another set of notes done according to the Cornell Note Taking System on female hysteria. And again if you look carefully, you can see the primary information in the main body, you see a summary of the main points at the bottom, and you see a set of questions on the side.
Again, if you know the information in your notes well enough, you should be able to answer those questions without the aid of the notes that you took in the body section. Now I wanna be clear about the Cornell Note Taking System. It's a fairly rigid system, and it's difficult to do it all the time for all of your courses. In fact, Cal Newport, who's the author of the blog Study Hacks, says that he thinks it's a little bit too strict of a method to use all the time that it becomes a little bit too onerous for students to use. The one thing I wanna say counter to that is that while it's true that it is a strict format, and while it's true that you may only use some parts of the system and not others, the true value of the Cornell Note Taking System is not in its actual structure, it's in what this structure requires the note taker to do. It requires the note taker to listen carefully during lecture, and listen attentively so that they can fill the body section of the notes. It then asks them to reengage that material to complete the summary column at the bottom, identifying all of the main ideas, key concepts, and most important information. It then requires that the student reengage the material yet again to formulate questions about the material to help cue the information in their mind or to serve as a study guide or even a self test later in studying.
What this means is that the Cornell Note Taking System requires the student in the moment of taking notes to engage the material multiple times for multiple different purposes, and we know for a fact that this is going to increase comprehension and retention, so even if you don't adopt the system in its entirety and even if you don't take all of the pieces, what you should attempt to do is to keep the spirit of the system in your note taking. Listen carefully, summarize, and then question.
Once you take your Cornell notes, you should review them regularly, don't put them away and never look at them again until the exam. Once or twice a week is usually a good bet until you have that material more or less under your mastery. Then you want to use your notes to develop sample questions and again if you're doing the Cornell Note Taking System, you're doing that as you take notes in your cue column.
You might also wanna take your notes and put them up against the notes of other students in the course. This allows you to do two things, one, it allows you to see if other students thought things were important that you didn't think were important, and it allows you to judge the quality of your notes, and two, it allows you and your colleagues to test each other before the test tests you. You can also loan your notes to a friend and when they give them back, just make sure that you ask for feedback on your notes.
It's always important for someone who's not you to tell you how they experienced your notes and how you might be able to make them better. And finally, save them. You never know when your notes for one course are going to come in helpful in another course. And as always, remember: if you have a note taking system that's like this or if you use this exact note taking system or if you have a totally different note taking system that works for you and you're getting the results that you want, keep doing it.