Listening and note-taking
Tips for note-taking:
- Don't take notes just for taking notes. Take it in an valuable and worthy way.
- Concentrate on important words (usually nouns, verbs, etc.) that give important information to you.
- Omit unimportant words.
- Have a consistent system for punctuation and abbreviation that will make sense to you. (It's unnecessary to make sense for others)
- Make the best of abbreviations, symbols and shapes.
Summary writing
Gist: the main or essential part
Summary: a comprehensive, brief abstract of previously stated facts or statements (don't make it too long and don't add personal opinions)
Listening to the gist:
- Don't get stuck on the difficult words and terms
- Try to listen to signal words like "for example", "because", etc.
- Skim and scan
Steps to write a lecture summary:
- Listen to the lecture
- Write down the lecturer's purpose for this talk and look for its major ideas
- Summarize all the major ideas into a single sentence
- Create a thesis statement/topic sentence for your summary which reflects the main ideas
- Combine your topic sentences with your main idea sentences to form a summary
