Notes on notes.
Some thoughts on how to take notes in physics. This is all personal preference, but it has served me well. 1. Use a bound notebook, ideally with quad-paper. Spiral-bound notebooks fall apart and binders are cumbersome (and the pages fall out before long). Bound notebooks keep you "honest." 2. Use a new page for each new class and/or topic. 3. Write on only side of the page - it makes it easier to read, particularly if you use pen (which can bleed through to the other side). 4. Give each new page a heading and date. 5. Use color to highlight central concepts and/or put boxes around important ideas or equations. 6. Draw pictures that represent the problem - label relevant things in the diagram. 7. Don't use a laptop to take notes. You spend too much time getting down trivial details and will inevitably miss something critical. It is also way too tedious to include equations, pictures, graphs, calculations and anything that really dem