Masters student, three two-hour lectures a week, and I have been typing something close to a transcript because I am afraid of missing things. It takes the whole lecture plus about four hours a week tidying afterwards, and when I open the file a fortnight later it is like reading someone else's work. I want to spend less time and remember more, which I realise is the whole problem stated backwards.
Mild disagreement with the anti-transcription crowd. Typing a lot is not automatically useless — it is useless if that is all you do. I type fast and near-verbatim, and then within 24 hours I turn each lecture into ten questions I cannot answer without looking. The transcript is raw material, not the product. What is killing you is not the typing, it is that the four hours afterwards are spent formatting rather than testing yourself.
That is uncomfortably accurate. My four hours are almost entirely headings, bullets and colour coding.
I stopped taking notes in lectures entirely for one term as an experiment. Attendance and attention both went up, exam results were unchanged, and the anxiety was much worse for about a month. It is not for everyone and I would not recommend it in a subject with heavy derivations. It did prove to me that the notes were not doing what I thought they were doing.
Record the audio and stop trying to capture words. I timestamp instead: a line, the time, and three words about what confused me. Reviewing means jumping to four timestamps rather than rereading eight pages, and it turned four hours of tidying into about forty minutes. Check your institution's rules on recording first, mine required asking the lecturer once at the start of term and every single one said yes.
Handwriting is slower than typing, which is the point. You cannot transcribe by hand so you are forced to compress, and compressing is the thinking. Slower notes, less of them, better recall.
Practical constraint that fixed this for me: one page per lecture, no exceptions. When the page is nearly full you have to decide what actually matters, which is the work you are currently avoiding by writing everything down.
@chapter_cass · 2w ago · 3 replies
Transcribing and understanding compete for the same attention, which is why complete notes and empty memory go together so often. What worked for me was leaving a wide margin and writing only questions during the lecture — things I did not follow, things that contradicted last week, anything the lecturer emphasised — and then filling the page in afterwards from the slides. The notes are much worse as a document and much better as a memory. Took about three weeks to stop feeling like I was missing everything.
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@tidy_tuesday_max · 2w ago
The questions-only approach also makes the after-session useful instead of decorative, because you are answering something rather than reformatting. That is the difference between studying and tidying.
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@labcoat_lior · 2w ago
I do a version of this where the margin is for questions and the main column is only for things the lecturer said that were not on the slides. Everything on a slide I already have.
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