The Cornell Note-Taking System

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Make effective notes, and recall those all-important points.

When you take notes at a meeting, conference or training session, are you confident that you'll actually be able to use them?

Perhaps your notes are clear and concise, and you can rely on them to help you to recall key points. Or maybe they're a nonsensical jumble of sentences. If so, it might be time to change your note-taking approach.

One tried-and-true method is the Cornell Note-Taking System. It was developed in the 1940s by education professor Walter Pauk at Cornell University, New York. Created to help students to learn, it found widespread popularity in his 1962 book, "How to Study in College," co-authored with Ross Owens.

The Cornell Note-Taking System is a simple and effective way to organize your notes as you write them, so that you can easily identify key points and actions later.

In this article, we look at how to use the Cornell system, and give a worked example.

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