Hello! Welcome to GMAT Tuesdays. I'm Kevin here at Magoosh and today we're going over note-taking.
We get a lot of questions that come in about taking notes whether or not you should take notes
when you're reading a passage students feel like they're taking too many notes and they
don't know what to do they feel like they're wasting their time doing it. I'm here to tell you
take notes! Note-taking is an important part of doing well, um especially when you have a very
long confusing complex maybe kind of boring reading passage in front of you. Note-taking
activates your mind it gives you something to do when you go into one of those passages
um so it gives you a little extra focus. It also um allows you to take things that you're keeping in
your short-term memory and put them down somewhere else so you don't have to hold them there while
you go through the questions and the answers. So it's actually going to be a great benefit for you.
So, a couple tips don't worry about your length at first you'll improve as you practice more so
in the beginning of your studies you know you're going to write a lot of notes you're not sure what
is important and what is not important you sort of are putting down information that you end up not
using later and so just keep at it keep focused keep reading you'll learn more and more about what
is important and what isn't. If you need a little help I recommend taking notes on the main idea
structure and purpose of the passage so always be thinking about what is this passage all about.
The structure, by that i mean uh what is the relationship of ideas from paragraph
to paragraph? And then finally what is the author's purpose is the author
describing something is the author arguing about something as simple as just figuring
out if they have an argument or if they're just describing some situation is probably enough.
So what I've done here is I took some notes on a passage there's going to be a
link down below the video not in the video but below the video go ahead and pause the video
click on the link read the passage at the very top there and then we can go through my notes. Ready? Go!
Are you back? Did you read it? I hope so! Okay um so when I first started studying
i took lots of notes on this passage there's three paragraphs I had three sections here
and I wrote down some details I wrote down some main ideas from the paragraph so let's dive in and
see um so the main idea I found was that there's amendment to the constitution that's a little
ambiguous so I wrote amendment two constitution then I have esteemed structure. So then the first
paragraph here we have: the founders like natural rights bill of rights added to protect natural
rights and then ninth amendment tells us more. Okay continuing forward I have traditionalists seen
ninth as not creating rights only protects rights that we have, stated or not. Then getting to the
third this is about the liberalists and as they see the ninth as protecting lots of rights
and in here I'm actually writing down some examples that are mentioned in the paragraph.
And so this is you know it's a nice outline, but it might take too much time on test day...
but at the beginning of your studies don't worry too much about time. Write down everything that
you think is important and as you progress and as you start working on your pacing then you
can start thinking about, "how do I write down only what's important? how do I shorten things
up? can I use abbreviations? can I use symbols? is there some way that I can speed this process up?"
and as you practice by the time you get to test day your notes will be very brief, very
abbreviated, and they're just there to sort of spark your mind to remind you about what
you read. So for example on test day I might not write amendment to constitution. I might just write
9th amend and not even spell it correctly because I don't care, um it's just there to remind me of
what the main idea is of the paragraph. It's kind of like a visual tool to click something
in your mind to remind you about what you read so this first paragraph I would definitely shorten
um excuse me in my notes. So I would go 'ff' for founding fathers and 9th, because that's
what the 9th amendment is about. Oftentimes what you might even do is instead of writing all this
if you've already identified the main idea, a lot of times the first paragraph introduces the main
idea. So I might just write main idea there's no other information in there. The second paragraph
is all about the traditionalists and their view of the ninth amendment so why not just write
'trad' 9th and then I'll remember oh that's where the traditionalists talk about their
view of the ninth amendment. Then finally here 'lib' 9th so here it will remind me
of the liberalists and their view of the 9th and hopefully as you read and read and read you
won't need to write down these details. You'll just need these sort of main ideas so you can go
back and navigate the passage if you are searching for a specific detail. All right so those are my
tips for note-taking, I have one pro-tip for you, don't use paper or pen when you are practicing.
Instead, mimic the test and get a dry erase marker and a small white board you can even
get those plastic sleeves that we put in binders put just a white piece of paper in
there and then you can write on that and wipe the clean with a kleenex um this will mimic
the testing environment more so than using pen and paper. It is a little strange to take notes
with these things because they are kind of fat and they'll bleed a little bit so um definitely
try to mimic the test environment as much as you can and take notes with dry erase markers.
All right if you have any comments questions put them below, um I'll be back here next Tuesday to
tell you more. I hope you have an excellent day! Be excellent to the universe and I will see you soon.