I'm Reading Big Brother

How do I take notes? Well that depends. I am not a really big fan on Cornell notes. They never worked for me and as teachers made me keep doing them over the years my distaste grew. Reason for not liking Cornell notes is because they are useless to me. The point is to have questions on one side and a summary or reflection on the bottom and later refer back to them as needed, but I just never found myself going back to review these notes. Instead if I can have hard paper copies of what I have to analyze in front of me I would much rather prefer that and would start examining the night away. As you can see with what I did with Orwell's piece down below, I used the margins to write myself notes and was able to underline and highlight things. I have seen college students tab their textbooks and highlight everywhere and I was always opposed to trying to mark the book, but just last year I rented a textbook and found myself highlighting and writing notes to the sides of the texts. And in this way, on quiz days or whenever there was an open notebook/textbook test, it was easier for me to locate certain information and remember what was read. On the other hand, if there is no way for me to underline, highlight or write in the textbook I would take notes of what I think is important to know. I usually do this in pencil. After I have completed my notes, I would go back to underline key words. As a result, I would be reviewing all the information I had just read. Another thing about the way I take notes is I have generated shortcuts over the past years so that I do not have to write out specific words. Typical shortcuts are + or w/ or b/c. Oh, and you can guarantee to see the sloppiest handwriting ever. Okay maybe not the sloppiest, but my notes can sometimes be so messy that I would be the only one to understand them. I call this doctors handwriting. Below are the first two pages of my notes on Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Definitely not a lot off writing going on compared to what I typically would have, and the margins of the paper were really small making it difficult to jot notes down. I did not want to try cramming words all over the page so I ended up mainly highlighting the key ideas.