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This tutorial is brought to you by EAPFoundation.com, the website for all your academic English needs
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An important academic skill for students is taking notes, which could be taking notes for reading, for example, to use in an essay or report
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or taking notes when listening, for example, listening to a lecture. In both cases you need to not only understand the information, but be able to record it in a clear, well-organized way
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so that you can use the information later. Today's tutorial will be focusing on different ways to record the information
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In other words, different styles of notes. We'll be looking at two main styles of notes, first of all, linear notes
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and then pattern notes. We'll also have a brief look at a very well-known note-taking system, the Cornell method
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Let's begin then by looking at linear notes. So for this tutorial I'm going to be taking notes on the screen so that you can actually see what these different styles of notes look like
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So beginning with linear notes Linear notes are also called outline notes The word linear may be familiar to you The meaning is clear if you look at the first four letters which spell the word line the noun form of this word So linear is the adjective
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In other words, linear is related to lines. And let me just show you here something you are probably familiar with
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It's very basic mathematics. So this is a straight line, Y equals Mx plus C
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And this is called a linear equation because it's the equation of a straight line
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So why are these called linear notes? Well the reason is because they have a straight line
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As you can see here, the notes go straight down the page. So this is the first feature of linear notes
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They go down the page. Another feature which you can already see from these notes
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is the use of numbers and letters. So 1 for linear, 2 for pattern
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And a third important feature of linear notes is indenting. What's indenting? Well, let me show you
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You can see here that there a space on the left side before go down numbers and indenting And the space is the same for all three which indicates that all three are on the same level because all three are features of linear notes
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so linear notes obviously have some advantages the main advantage is that they are very clear
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and they're especially useful if the structure of what you're reading or what you're
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listening to is clear because of course you have to understand the structure and
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organize the information when you take your notes so looking at the second kind so
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first of all there is a table another example of pattern notes is a flow
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chart a third example is a tree diagram and the final example maybe the most
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common one is a spider gram and the first three of these as we'll see short
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These are special kind of notes for a special purpose, whereas Spirogram is much more general and can be used any time
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So again, looking at the features of linear notes, you can see here indenting
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So there's indenting up there, and there's indenting down there, and the indenting is the same each time And then we talked about numbers and now letters so we can very easily see from this that there are two main ideas And for pattern notes there are four examples four types
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And all of that, as I've already said, helps to make the notes very clear
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One of the main disadvantages of linear notes is that they are less visual
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which might be important if you're a visual learners. And going back to numbering briefly
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there's many different numbers and letters that you could use. 45, Roman numerals, capital letters, small letters and so on
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Let's move on then to look at pattern notes. So as we just saw there are four kinds of pattern notes
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I'm going to begin by looking at table. So this kind of pattern notes are especially common when you are reading
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And the reason for this is because of the purpose. A table is used to contrast or show the differences between two or more things
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And so this type of notes are likely to be used just for one portion of the lecture or for the reading text rather than for the whole text
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So as we've been looking at linear and pattern notes, let me take notes of those in a table format
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So as I just said, one advantage of linear notes is that they are clear. They are very clear
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And pattern notes are
