I spend about five hours a week turning scrappy lecture notes into a clean, linked, colour-coded second set. It feels productive, the finished pages are lovely, and my exam results have not moved in two years. I keep reading that rewriting notes is one of the least effective things you can do, but I also cannot tell whether my problem is the rewriting or what I do with it afterwards.
Five hours a week is a big budget. Spend one hour of it rewriting, if you enjoy it, and four hours doing past questions under time pressure. Results move.
I did exactly this for a year and a half and the honest diagnosis was that copying is a comfortable activity that feels like studying. The test I eventually applied: if I could do the task while mildly bored and listening to a podcast, it was not learning. Rewriting passed that test easily. Turning each page into three questions I had to answer from memory did not, because it was hard and I hated it, which turned out to be the point.
The podcast test is brutally effective as a filter. Almost everything I call revision fails it.
Five hours a week of colour coding, all of which I could do while half watching television. That is the answer, isn't it.
I kept rewriting through a whole degree and I do think it earned its place, but not for the reason I assumed. It was not the notes, it was that revisiting each lecture three or four times across a term spread the exposure out. You could get the same benefit from ten minutes of self-testing on the same schedule, and I would take those hours back if I could.
Partial defence of rewriting, because the blanket dismissal is too strong. Doing it once, from memory, a few days after the lecture, with the original closed, is a genuinely useful exercise — you are testing recall and reorganising at the same time. Doing it with the original open, immediately, is copying. Same activity, completely different value, and the difference is whether the source is in front of you.
That is a good refinement and it matches what changed for me. Closed-book reconstruction was the version that felt awful and worked.
The tell is what happens to the beautiful second set. If you never open it again, it was never notes, it was a craft project. Mine were a craft project and I was quite good at it.
@etym_elliot · 5mo ago
There is a real distinction hiding in your question and it is worth naming. Notes taken during a lecture are capture; notes made afterwards are supposed to be processing. Rewriting is only processing if the second version is structurally different from the first — reorganised by concept rather than by lecture, with your own examples, with the gaps you could not fill marked. If the second version is the first version in nicer handwriting, you have done transcription twice.
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