Note taking vs note making

Note-taking is when you capture information in its pure, raw form. It is often done when listening. When note-taking, you are using the author's original language.

The purpose of note-taking is to quickly capture content so you can refer back to it later without looking at the original source.

Note-taking is fast and easy, but is poorly assimilated, forgotten and is hard to make connections between ideas.

Note-making is when you flesh out your own ideas from raw notes. Note-making enables you to learn and create better. You use your own words to describe the ideas that you jot down during the note-taking phase.

Note-making makes use of the Generation Effect to help us learn better.

Note-making is slower and more tedious, but the ideas from note-making is easier to remember and understand.

Note-making is active, while note-taking is passive.

It's important to set aside time every week, or even daily to process your notes. Instead of multitasking and doing reading and processing simultaneously, divide your time for reading and taking raw notes time, and time for processing notes.

Sometimes, we can have a backlog of raw notes. To prevent this, process regularly, or you might even leave them there, and come back to it for processing at a later date when they become more relevant to you.