What to write during the hour, and what to do with it after, is below.
Write the argument, not the transcript
Slides already store the headings, so duplicating them spends the hour on stenography. Write what the room adds: the because sentences, the worked example's turning point, the aside where the lecturer says this is what people get wrong. A page of becauses serves the later studier far more than a page of copied bullets, since the becauses are precisely what the slide deck will be missing when you interrogate it later.
Mark confusion live: the question margin
Keep a margin for live questions: the moment something does not follow, write the question and move on, rather than stalling the pen while the lecture proceeds. Those margin questions are the day's most valuable output, because they are personalized gaps no generated quiz can know about; they mark the exact places where the lecture's logic and your understanding parted company, in real time. After the lecture they get answers, from the reread, a classmate, or office hours, and each answered one becomes a card whose front you wrote at the exact moment of not knowing.
Handwriting versus typing: the honest trade
The famous laptop versus longhand studies found longhand notes tilted toward summarizing and laptops toward verbatim capture, with the summarizing style associated with deeper processing; later replications complicated the effect sizes, so this guide claims the mechanism, not a percentage. The practical reading: whichever tool you hold, force compression, your words, shorter than the speech. Verbatim is a recording, and recordings do not study themselves.
Same day routing: page to practice
A note page's value decays with the memory of the room, and the replicated curve says the first day does the most damage, losses on the order of two thirds for material left untouched. The decay claim is not folklore: the 2015 Ebbinghaus replication reproduces the first day as the curve's steepest stretch. So route pages the same day: photograph the notebook, let the photo path lift definitions and facts into cards, and answer a short generated round while the becauses are still reconstructible. Ten same day minutes buy what an hour cannot buy next week.
The weekly sweep
Once a week, sweep the margin questions: anything still unanswered escalates to a classmate or the lecturer, and anything answered gets its card. The sweep keeps the notebook a working tool rather than an archive of good intentions. Stated plainly, in this article's own words: the longhand literature is contested and cited here for mechanism only, and WeSolve+ contributes no usage numbers to this piece because it has none published; the same day routing case rests on the public forgetting data.
By Eren Kayıkçı (Study planning and habits)
Sources used on this page
- Forgetting curve
- Spaced repetition
- Testing effect
- Active recall
- Distributed practice
- Roediger and Karpicke 2006, test-enhanced learning
- Karpicke and Roediger 2008, Science
- Dunlosky et al. 2013, technique effectiveness review
- Cepeda et al. 2008, the spacing experiment
- Murre and Dros 2015, the Ebbinghaus replication
- Metacognition
- Long-term memory
- Desirable difficulty
- Study skills
- Flashcard
- Working memory
- Note-taking
- Lecture
- Shorthand
- Handwriting
- Laptop
- Summary
- Verbatim
- Margin (typography)
- Office hours
- Archive
- Escalation
- Pen
What should I write during lecture?
The becauses, turning points and warnings the room adds; the slides already store the headings.
What is the question margin?
A live column for confusions: write the question, keep moving, answer it after, card the answer.
Laptop or notebook?
Either, with forced compression: your words, shorter than the speech. The tool matters less than the summarizing.
When should notes become practice?
Same day: photograph the page and run a short round while the room's memory can still fill gaps.
Does the app take notes for me?
No: it converts pages you wrote into questions and cards. The writing, and the thinking inside it, stays yours.
Last updated: 2026-08-15 · Written with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.