| >In lectures, note-taking at all should be avoided, most of the time. That's a very strong statement that I guess is based on your own personal experience? If I can provide my own subjective opinion and educated guess, I do agree that taking notes verbatim feels close to pointless. You need to take in what you're hearing and grok it before you jot down your summary. Then you can go revisit your notes later to practice, or even better try to recall without looking at them first, and then check to corroborate. >The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous. I don't think anyone has suggested this to be the case. Even though it doesn't work that way for you, the point of note-taking even when the information is available from other materials is to facilitate retention and understanding, not to produce superior source material. I do believe it is effective for this purpose, for most people. All through my education, I never really bothered to listen to teachers and lecturers and basically never took notes. I just read course literature and tried to grok the main concepts, and it worked wonders for getting me through tests and exams. Longer term retention of what I learned was atrocious though. Now as an adult I take notes and study in a much more disciplined way, and it's so much more effective long term that it leaves me with a sense of regret that I didn't know or realize all this as a kid. Just my two cents. |
You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.