We’ve all seen aesthetic note taking trends on social media, crisp white pieces of paper with perfect handwriting, decorated with pastel highlighters and headings that look like they were designed by professional hand lettering artists rather than the school or university students who actually did them. These short videos and pictures have been trending for a long time, often showcasing an array of fancy highlighters, brush pens and other stationary. In this blog post, I’ll tell you about some note-taking methods and an easy way to make your notes aesthetic.
But first, will pretty notes improve your grades?
Though it depends from person to person, neat, color coded notes often encourage people to study them whereas messy notes make it difficult to focus. My notes are far from perfect, though I try to make them pretty as this encourages me to study them but also makes the note taking process fun instead of long and dull. It helps me remember the concepts when I draw diagrams and use different colors. You don’t have to have aesthetic notes to get good grades. All you need to get good grades is a pencil, a computer if needed, and your brain. If you don’t mind messy notes or you are a perfectionist and it will bother you if your notes do not turn out perfect, you don’t need to have aesthetic notes. Everyone is different and some methods don’t work very well for some people when they may work really well for others.
A simple way to make your notes more aesthetic.
Now I’ll show you what I do to make my notes more organized and visually appealing. First, I pick one color to use for that section of notes. All you need is a black pen, a highlighter in the color you have chosen and a pen in that same color. The titles may seem a bit complicated but as they say, “practice makes perfect”. For the title I have a couple different methods that you can see in the picture below. It’s a good idea to do your titles after you take your notes especially if your taking them while the teacher is talking.
I take my notes in bullet points, just a simple dot and then a dash for a sub bullet. All you have to do is write down your text in black pen, write any important words or phrases that you come across using the colored pen. You can add definitions to these terms in the end if you like. I sometimes highlight a part of the text and add a note or question about it in the margin. Simply doing this makes your notes a lot more visually appealing. You can also add diagrams.
Other methods:
One popular note-taking method is the Cornell method. The page is divided into four sections, the header section which you probably already have in your notebook, two columns and one section at the end of your notes. One of the two columns is a smaller column to the left of the page, kind of like the margin. The larger column takes up most of the page. You take all of your notes in this column. Then you use the section at the end to write a summary about the notes. The smaller column is used to write down any questions that you may have or any details that seem important.
Remember, at the end of the day your notes are going to benefit you. So take them in a way that’s going to work for you. If aesthetic notes don’t work for you, you don’t have to have them even though they’re trending. I hope this post helps!