TAKING NOTES WHILE LISTENING

TAKING NOTES WHILE LISTENING

Good listeners take down notes. However, this note taking should not be done at the cost of listening. If too much of time is spent taking down notes, listeners may miss the heart of the message! A few good tips for taking down notes are:

1 Have adequate paper, a good pen and a pencil or two
2 Use uncluttered backup for support while you take down notes
3 Label your notes for easy identification later
4 Listen to the list of cues such as „first‟, „second‟ and „finally‟ or „in summary‟ so as to catch these details and take down notes accordingly.
5 Flag / mark important parts of notes by using brackets, underscore, arrows etc
6 Listen for special instructions
7 After the speech, go over notes promptly to fix major points more firmly in mind.