Opinion: Pretty notes help you study better

Colorful notes boost creativity and inspiration, which fuel your motivation to study and help you come up with new ideas, according to a Medium post. Highlighting key ideas emphasizes them and acts as a reminder to help you remember important details. If you decide to highlight, having a simple highlighting guide is beneficial in locating things. The vibrancy also keeps you alert and away from those feelings of tiredness and distraction.

Making your notes look pretty may be important, but only focusing on what colors you are using or different types of banners doesn’t help you. However, pretty notes require handwriting rather than typing, which forces you to process and interpret things in your own words, according to National Public Radio. They also have a greater transfer of information. Doodlers who draw small sketches to remember key terms retain 29% more information than people who don’t.

Not to mention, nice notes are organized with defined sections, making it succinct and concise. They are easier for you to link your notes to the textbook. You learn better when your ideas and thoughts are easy to read and find according to Psychology Today. The process of making notes helps with memory; it directs your mental energy into understanding the material that you are studying.

According to The Conversation, different types of notes also contribute to more productive studying. The online method emphasizes a clear, logical structure that allows you to reduce time reviewing and editing. The Cornell Method is a quick way to take notes that summarizes and extracts main ideas compared to the boxing method, which organizes your ideas into boxes that focus your mind on one thing at a time and allow you to memorize things visually. You get comparable, structured notes and can easily memorize and review information with the charting method. When you still want to maintain a neat overview, the mapping method is one of the most visually appealing types of notes but is laconic and easy to look over.

If you’re comparing your notes to the ones you see on Pinterest, you can try to recreate them! This adds a fun element to note-taking and can make you look forward to studying. The difference in pen types is really important and testing out each type helps you find the one that is easiest to write with; writing in ink, especially blue, is also better than pencil. Taking notes in a bullet journal or with graph and colored paper causes a huge difference too: you’re more inclined to write neater. Drawing pictures of anything is another great way to remember things artistically and add a cool spark. For classes like history, timelines are efficient for mapping out events.

Having beautiful notes don’t guarantee you good grades. Interacting with your notes by reviewing, revising them everyday, asking questions (Cornell Style) and reflecting can help you perform better on test as well.

Taking notes and studying ways are different for everyone, but it’s important to stick with the ones that work for you. So study on, fellow students!