Notes making can reduce your time and efforts drastically. It provides flexibility of revising large amount of data faster, easily and quickly. Hence notes making is one of the significant pillars of your preparation.
The notes making will help you in preliminary, mains and interview. However, before notes making, you must go through the previous years’ question papers as well as the syllabus.
Because you will get to know which topics you need to emphasize while making notes. Along with that you must ensure that you are evaluating, changing or altering them time to time as per the demands of the exam.
Now question arises how you will get to know whether you are following the right path or not. Don’t worry about that by the end of that article you will learn everything.
Is Notes Making Important for UPSC?
Notes making improves your thought process, expressions, brainstorming ability, memory retention, writing skills, vocabulary, presentation skills etc. Additionally, these skills bring more clarity in an understanding concepts as a result it reduces your efforts drastically.
These skills improve your answer writing skills which is one of the significant pillars of your preparation. Therefore, you must prepare notes and revise them multiple times.
How to make notes for UPSC?
In the First reading just highlight the texts on the books or the materials. From the second reading and onwards you can start making handmade or digital notes.
If you adopt both ways to prepare your notes, that will be the best way to prepare and manage your notes. The reason is that some of your notes always require change and some of them don’t.
You can make notes in a spiral book or A4 paper sheets. But I would recommend that you should make notes on loose A4 paper sheets because they provide flexibility to make changes in the notes from time to time. You can alter, add, reduce the data in the notes.
If you are making the notes in registers or spirals, that’s fine. You can choose the method whichever you are comfortable with.
However you must keep in the mind that notes making is an art and that will improve with the repetition and practice.
Now let’s know the methods of notes making comprehensively.
Followings are the steps you need to follow to make notes
Highlighting the texts:
In the first reading and onwards you must start highlighting the important points. You can use a highlighter, pen, pencil, color marker. With more revisions, you will find new information from the book. And hence you need to revise books often times.
Bullet points:
From the second reading or onwards you need to start making notes. You can make them either digital or handmade. But notes ought to be easy and simple to understand.
Instead of lengthy passages. Create your notes in bullet points. This method will help to make your notes short and concise. The consistency ought to be maintained in revision. And you can also use these points directly in your answers as well.
Flowcharts:
This is one of the best techniques to explain the topic in detail especially in the questions where you will have to explain the correlation between the things. That method helps in enhancing your ability to correlate things and concepts.
Because having knowledge is not enough, the ability to correlate and apply that knowledge is a challenge. And with this technique, you can easily manage.
Mind maps:
This method helps us to break our main topics into small chunks. And makes it easier to understand deeply. It reduces our work burden. This method explains much information in short form. It helps to stand out your answers from the crowd.
If you will prepare mind maps. It will improve presentation skills. You will get an extra edge in marks.
Sticky notes:
You should also use the sticky notes to remember important points which might include articles, factual data, report data, examples and other crucial information.
Examples/Reports data /Statistics:
You can gather information, real-life examples, reports data, statistics from reports of eminent institutions, economics surveys, ARC reports, newspapers, yojana magazine, Sansad TV channel shows and others.
You can utilize that data in your answers as well as interview. Such information brings depth to your answers.
Introduction /Definition templates:
This is the most important among all the steps because your answers will be evaluated on the basis of the introduction of your answer.
Therefore make your own definition/intro templates ready to use in your answers. You can get these from your books or study materials and other sources.
Conclusion template:
Conclusions are a summary of your entire answer and they must be positive in nature. Because your answer must be ended with a positive note. And hence it is important to make conclusion template notes.
Slip Pad/Small dairy :
Develop a habit of carrying a pocket-sized diary or small slip pad with you. In that, you will be adding the crucial keywords which will help you to develop keywords or vocabulary.
Moreover, you can also make such a diary or slip pad for gathering examples, important supreme court judgments, reports, statistics etc.
It provides a good opportunity to keep your data ready to revise and use anytime. You can review it during your travel time, when you walking, exercising, while having coffee or tea. You can also use it for discussion with your friends and add points.
You can also make and adopt your own method of notes making or whichever you are comfortable with.