How To Take Detailed Notes For A Level Subjects *that are actually useful*

okay guys so in the last video we spoke about how you can take notes and give you some tips and advice on how to do them so i thought in today's video i'm going to get some notes for you and we're actually going to do a live note-taking demonstration so from here as you can see i've got some a-level physics so a lot of you may not be doing a level physics that's totally fine the notes that i chose for today have an equal kind of spacing of definitions equations and some diagrams so this should be able to apply to pretty much any a-level you're doing so and i'm just going to show you my process of doing it so these are just from physics and maths tutor so i'll leave the link to these notes in the description just so you can get to them but let's get started so we'll just do a couple of pages of this so first things first we're going to write the title so the title for this one as you can see is particles so i'll just literally write particles and radiation so your handwriting doesn't actually need to be particularly neat with this all that matters is you get down the proper information and you kind of color code it properly and for the first part it's literally just particles so using subheadings and things like that are really good make them stand out by underlining them capitalizing et cetera you can even write them in different colors if you have another color so as you can see on the right i just have four different colors i also have blue i also have a pencil and a ruler that's all you really need if you're using a tablet then you basically have an infinite number of colors and let's just start reading through it so the first part says kind of the constituents of an atom an atom is formed of three constituents protons neutrons and electrons so that will be the first thing i write okay so atoms made of protons neutrons and electrons also feel free to watch this either on speed two or maybe even skip through it so you can just see the process afterwards and that'd be the first thing now the rest is information so they're known as nucleons so we can even write that down as well so nucleons found in nucleus so this would be protons and neutrons so as you can see that first paragraph is basically written in two small sentences so just take out the key information now this is where knowing your spec is actually going to come in really really handy because if you know your spec you know exactly what you can be tested on so i would actually have while i'm making my notes for the first time a printed specification and i can just have a look at the bullet points because it's a bullet pointed list exactly what they want me to know so for that that's all we actually need now this table here and this is actually a lot of this is from gcse science so some most of you are probably already going to know this anyway but there is a new equation here specific charge now for specific charge since it's an equation i like to use a different color so for this i'm just going to use let's say purple and all i do is i write out specific charge and that is just equal to the charge of the particle divided by its mass and the reason why we're using a different color is this stands out so if i'm looking at my particles and radiation notes chances are i'm actually going to be looking for an equation so i can quickly see exactly where the equation is and the next part that we have are the units so it tells you the unit slightly further down so here it says coulombs per kilogram so i'm just going to write here for units in maths and physics and science and things i actually put the units in square brackets just to make it super super clear so that is exactly what i do and the rest of this is kind of obvious so here it says the specific charge is the charge to mass ratio so you can kind of ask yourself whether or not you want to write that down now for me personally i know that if you divide one number by another you can always say that that's a ratio or it's a division or it's a charge per unit mass i know that instinctively so i don't need to write it there's no reason why you don't have to write it remember these notes are for you so other than that i think this is pretty much everything else we need but there is another important thing here we have this it's a type of notation so in chemistry and physics instead of writing out you know for example carbon and then we say exactly how many protons and neutrons it has instead we use this we use chemical symbols so what we're going to do here is we're going to write that out and since it's something different i'm actually going to write out in green it's a notation so i personally write notations in green so so far purple for calculations like equations uh like this cyan color for units and i'm going to use green if it's a notation so it doesn't come up that often but we're going to have x and a said and then what we're going to do is define exactly what they are now since it's just words i'm going to write it in black so z is just the proton slash atomic number so this is unique for every single element and then we have the mass number or the nuclear number and that's unique for every single isotope so again i've summed up basically the whole first page of notes and i've summed it up in maybe a third of a page okay so that's kind of the power of note taking and this is all of the important information so again let's say this this example here you can use it if you want so if math isn't your strong suit or you kind of don't understand a calculation have an example and i would write those out in blue i'll write example one and i'll have basically exactly what it says on the screen at the moment and that would help me out but again for me i think that's totally fine just take the charge divided by math that's totally fine okay and the next thing we have is another definition however this definition is a bit special so isotopes are atoms with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons so again if you're if you're not doing a level physics or you're not planning on doing it that's totally fine essentially what i'm doing here is i'm taking notes in roughly the same way you'd expect so we have like definitions we've had calculations we have notation we're going to have some diagrams as well so just take the bits that you are used to so you should be looking at this and seeing why i'm making the decisions i am and how i can apply it so it can apply to any subject so since this is a definition i like to write definitions in something that sticks out so the this is actually an exam definition so again this is where knowing your specification helps this up here atoms made of protons neutrons electrons nucleons are these this proton and mass number i know that this isn't an exam question they'll never ask me what z is they won't ask me what atoms are made of but i know that they will ask me or they can ask me more likely that what an isotope is so again knowing your specification and having that out in front of you in lessons and whenever you're doing questions and notes etcetera is extremely important so simply just write out the definition isotopes are atoms with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons okay so what i'm extracting here is as many marks as possible this is an answer to a one mark exam question so there you go i've got one mark right here and i've also got some marks for the specific charge when that comes up so if you have a look at the rest of it this is done through carbon dating et cetera this is just an example of an isotope but if i understand what isotope is maybe from gcse or just from my own knowledge i don't need to write it down so that's another paragraph we don't need so now we're looking at stable and unstable nuclei you can write a little subheading if you'd like let's just do it to be super neat so stable i promise i'm not going through all of these notes by the way it'll only be a short session so i'm not going to go through all of these so stable and unstable whoops nuclei so i'm writing a bit quickly that's why my handwriting isn't the best and the next thing he says the strong nuclear force keeps nuclei stable by counteracting electromagnetic so probably the next thing i'm right so and this is where you can kind of have a creative choice here they define the strong nuclear force first and then they draw the diagram but personally i'd actually draw the graph first okay so let's do that so again ruler and pencil always draw diagrams in pencil you can go over them in pen afterwards but i do them really lightly in pencil and if i want to go over them and pen i can i can trace that out keep in mind if you have a pen you can't actually erase it and tip x is really ugly for notes and it can ruin the paper now of course if you're using a tablet this isn't a problem at all so let's draw this graph out again use a ruler that's neat i'm not going to go over this in pen but like i said you're more than welcome to and then we want to stick it out a little bit and then we do our little arrows and then actually we don't need one there and all we need to do now is take out the important information okay so if we look at the important information here it's a graph so what's important about a graph well these numbers on the side that they have are important the actual overall shape of the graph is important as well as um kind of this bit on the side where it says repulsive and attractive so let's draw the shape first so again it doesn't need to be perfect uh something like that that's okay the overall shape is good and what are these things on the side so the axis names we have separation of neutrons and femtometers so separation of new cleons uh in femtometers and along this axis it's the force between nucleons and so i might write this in the margin and that's in times 10 to the minus 4 newtons cool and now we actually want to add the values that we have so first off this is obviously the origin zero this here is 0.5 i'm just getting this from the notes by the way don't worry about understanding this because if you're not doing physics it really doesn't matter to you and this down here says attractive again i will actually have videos on a level physics so i will explain this graph at some point on the channel but i'll come up a bit later and up here is plus three and here it's repulsive and since that's a different color i'm actually going to use a different color as well so okay and again that just helps it stand up from the axis title as well right because i'm not writing it all in black just keep in mind your mind can your brain actually picks out or your eyes whatever you want to call it will pick out different colors very easily like the things drawing my eyes at the moment is this pink thing here which i said was an exam question so it's good that my brain is picking that out and then the calculation which is important too and then this repulsive thing and right underneath i've got attractive that's the important part of the graph okay so again i didn't spend super long in it you're not vincent van gogh or anything don't make it super you don't have to make it super pretty some people actually like it when their things look pretty so it motivates them to do the notes more that's totally fine makes it easier to look at too so if you want to do that that's totally fine but it's not necessary and okay so now let's finish off the notes for the strong nuclear force so what exactly is it so it says here that it keeps nuclei stable by counteracting the electromagnetic forces of repulsion okay cool so what does this mean to me so keep in mind that i'm not mindlessly copying out the notes if you look at my notes compared to the notes on the screen they aren't the same the wording is different because what i'm doing is i'm taking in the information and then i'm explaining it in my own words now of course the wording is similar because it's the same idea but it shouldn't be the same okay so strong nuclear force keeps nucleus stable so what does it do well it holds nuclei together the strong nuclear force and again these are just words this isn't an exam question so the strong nuclear force holds atomic nuclei together and one other thing you should note is that when you do note taking it doesn't mean that you just make it smaller that's not what it always means if you want to copy an exact passage that's more than you're more than happy to do it or you may find a definition but you don't think it's enough so you instead of a one sentence definition you actually have a two sentence one that's still note taking it doesn't have to be shorter it's just writing things in your own words that you can use to study from and then how does it do that so how does it hold them together actually i need to finish the word together by opposing electrostatic force between protons and again they wrote that it's repulsion but i know that because they're the same charge they're going to be pushing each other apart that's fine so now there's something in the notes that i've got on the screen that isn't and that's going to be in my notes on paper and what's that well they're giving me a graph great what does the graph mean explaining this kind of graph is an exam question or it can be but let's say it's not let's say assume it wasn't i need to understand this graph how can i test my understanding well what i'm going to do is say what this graph shows okay because if i can say what this graph shows then i understand the concepts now when you're whenever you're drawing a graph you need to understand it or a diagram any kind of diagram again this works for things like geography and history and everything when you're looking at a table a graph a picture whatever you should explain to yourself what's going on and does it make sense because that's how you know you you understand the concept okay so in this question what's going on here well over here it says that when it's below this line it's attractive so between 0.5 and 3 it's attractive so let's write this out so 0.5 to 3 fm it's attractive and i also might want to write what a femtometer is a centimeter is a million billionth of a meter okay and what about below this well below 0.5 fm it's repulsive whoops and this is where you might ask the question well why is it repulsive why does it go from repulsive to attractive again if you're not doing um science that's totally fine but all it's to stop is to stop from nucleons overlapping each other so so that might be a question i write in the margin in blue and say well i'm going to ask my teacher why is it repulsive okay so i might literally do that so right and that little note there means the next time i look at these i'm going to now go to my physics teacher and say why does it go from repulsive to attractive i don't understand that and they can explain it to you uh in this case it just means because i already know the answer again you can with this question here you can google it ask your teacher ask your tutors whatever but i already know the answer it prevents nucleons overlapping the reason for that is the radius of a nucleon is about half a femtometer cool and what's the last thing i can tell well it goes to zero at three fm so it's short range and you can just say approximately three centimeters okay so that is everything this graph tells me in words okay so now we need to change over go to the next page so let's do that now let's make sure it's in frame still a bit lower there we are and i'm just going to do a little bit more and if you look here it says unstable nuclear those have too many protons neutrons or both causing the strong nuclear force not to be enough to keep them stable cool so i'm just going to write unstable nuclei too many protons neutrons are both slash neutrons slash both so then i might say some definitions again this is not an exam question so it's just in black this is just for my own understanding so strong nuclear force which they call snf too weak to hold nuclear together to hold nuclei together and another thing is that it means it's going to decay so the last thing i'll do is i'll talk about these two types of decays in my notes and then i'm going to stop okay so we have essentially an equation right it's kind of like an equation here and it looks very complicated but it's actually not that bad so let's talk about alpha decay again we're not going to go too much in the physics of this because a lot of you aren't going to be doing physics that's totally fine but hopefully you can see how i lay out different sets of notes so after k this is normally large nuclei and again i'm basically rewriting what's here so it says it occurs in large nuclei of too many of both protons and neutral neutrons so large nuclei too many protons and neutrons okay so i'm basically just rewriting what it says but in my own kind of way and then because it's like a notation right remember what color notation was it's green so let's use green so we have a as soon as the pen starts to work a z x goes to a minus four because it loses four of its atomic number z minus 2 because it loses 2 protons and that's going to be y plus alpha particle cool and then i'm going to write what actually happens so what happens well proton number decrease by 2 mass number decrease by four and that's it that basically tells me everything that is said on here right so that's all good now if you notice i actually rewrote this exactly the reason why is because when i looked at it on the screen i thought actually that's a good way to represent the information so i'm going to copy it and honestly there's not really many ways to reword this that aren't just semantic differences what i mean by that is don't don't feel forced to rewrite everything in a different way if it's just one sentence it's very basic don't like get out your thesaurus and start looking up synonyms just to make it different rewrite it assuming that you would explain it in a different way which honestly for most things you'll write them in a different way but in this case honestly there's not really many other ways to write that so i'm going to leave it like that and lastly but not least we have beta minus decay and if you look on the screen a lot of words nuclei which are neutral and rich have too many neutrons so all i need to write really is neutron rich you don't need to write in full sentences right in a way that makes sense to you because you're the one that's going to be benefiting from these by the way unless you're also going to sell these online so you might want to think about that too but if it makes sense to you i guarantee you it makes sense to at least one other person on the planet and that goes along and we have a and the proton number increases by one y and then we have zero minus one these particle plus an anti-electron neutrino that might have been a bunch of words that you're not too sure about again don't worry this is just an example so proton number here what happens to it it increases by one and the mass neutral number same so if you have a look we've done the first three pages of notes actually no no we've done two pages of notes and we've done it in a page and a half so you might think well that's not very much right but basically i'm only taking up 75 of the space so if you had 100 pages of notes that you're meant to record you'll only need to write down 75 pages but again it's not about rewriting in a short way it's about rewriting in a way that makes sense to you because what this has forced me to do is read what's on the screen understand what's on the screen and then write it in my own way so i'm learning this if you literally just copy out everything that's on the screen now you won't understand it which means you won't remember it you may as well be reading something in french as writing out french without understanding it right you need to understand what you're doing if you don't understand you may as well be writing in a different language for the good it's going to do you so i hope you found that really useful or at least somewhat useful and it gives you some ideas on kind of what i mean by using colors and using rulers and pencils and stuff and hopefully you can kind of see where it's going again if you're not doing physics don't worry hopefully you can see that a lot of this is applicable to other kind of disciplines and i hope that you have a truly wonderful day