Jottings, abbreviations and symbols
Once you have identified the key ideas you are in a position to take some brief notes or jottings. Indeed, you will find that highlighting on its own is a rather passive process and as a result you may not remember the ideas that you identified. Rather than returning to the highlighted text every time you want to revisit or draw upon these ideas, only to find that what you have marked does not make sense to you anymore, it is useful to develop a form of short note taking. So, getting key ideas down in shorthand form is useful both when highlighting is not enough and when you want to get working with the material more actively. Of course, some people find it useful to add short notes into the margins of highlighted texts to remind themselves of why they felt a point to be relevant or of an example they could use to illustrate a particular issue. This involves more active engagement with the text, but it is not until you start to make your own notes, in your own words that you can really check that you understand ideas enough to work with and use them, particularly in preparation for assignments and exams.
As with highlighting, you need to take care when taking short notes to be selective. Trying to get everything down is very time consuming and results in notes that are as long as the article itself! One way of both cutting down the time spent making notes and keeping them to an appropriate length is to make use of symbols, shorthand and abbreviations. You might already know some, to which you can add others that you make up throughout your time as a student. We use a whole range of symbols and abbreviations some of which are reproduced below:
In addition, we use our own form of shorthand which sometimes entails leaving out vowels or cutting off the end of words. This method is particularly effective where longer words are concerned. For example, concentrated becomes cone, advantage and disadvantage become adv. and disadv. respectively, and consequently becomes consq. Developing your own version which makes sense to you can be extremely time efficient and after a while it becomes a language of your own which flows from the pen easily.
To find out how to make sense of your underlining and jottings go to Extracting a summary.