 Hello friends, welcome to my channel, I am Arpita Kaurva and in this video I am going to tell you how toppers prepare notes when they are preparing for UGC net English examination. You might have covered the entire syllabus and you are 1000% confident about acing this competitive exam, but just 5-10 days before the exam when your mind has absorbed so much information, you find that things are starting getting merged. If you are a literature student then you might find that words like Elizabeth, John, Jane are getting jumbled together since you have read so many writers and so many characters sharing the same name. And this is the point when you start questioning your preparation. But don't worry, I am here to help and I won't let you face this situation. How? By teaching you a power packed strategy about making notes. Notes friends help you with retention. Research says that when you write something with your hands it tends to stay in your mind for a longer period of time. In fact not just that, notes are also going to help you with revision. Imagine the time and effort that effective notes can help you save. So friends the first thing that comes to our mind while making notes is whether we should use computer based notes or handwritten notes. I will give you a clear picture about both these options. So basically handwritten notes are better for retention but if you have fear that you might lose the notes then you can use apps like Microsoft One Note, EverNote or other notes making apps available online. They get synced on your laptop, phones and tablets plus they give you multiple notebook options. So you can make multiple pages in each notebook. For example each notebook could be for one writer and then you can add different pages talking about different works of those writers. On the other hand if you are using handwritten notes you have to use it in a proper fashion. How to do that? So you can make separate notebooks for different ages or different topics and that is how you are going to segregate different topics that you are studying for this exam. The next tip is to make exam relevant notes. Friends have seen students who make notes that are buried in emotions. I have a friend who loves Francis Bacon a literary writer those of you who are not from UGC Net and are watching this video. So this writer Francis Bacon is not a very very important writer of UGC Net exam but my friend because she loved Francis Bacon so much she filled 75 pages just by writing information about Francis Bacon. This will harm you in two ways. Number one it will kill a lot of your time and number two this exercises futile because such questions never come in the exam and because it won't be exam relevant there is no point putting in so much time and energy to make such huge notes. Also from the exam's perspective almost thousand writers are important. Imagine if you start giving so much time and effort to each writer then you will never be able to complete your notes. In fact exam se pehle poora syllabus complete hi nahi ho pahega you will never get time to even revise. So I would suggest you that you have to opt for exam relevant notes for that you can check out arpathakarva.com where in we have uploaded list of all the writers and that list mind you is for free so you can go and check out the list of writers and you can start preparing exam relevant notes for each of them and if you are looking for somebody or someone who can give you exam relevant notes then you can join our UGC Net online course where in we provide detailed information about each writer from UGC Net exam perspective. The third important tip is to use pointers and not paragraphs while making notes. So always ensure that you are writing notes in pointers. Again I just told you how your brain remembers pointers in mind maps in not long paragraphs plus paragraphs are very difficult to revise and you will realize it yourself that pointers are very easy to grasp. You just have to glance at them and you are good to go. Also remember that your notes have to be very short. You don't have to write full sentences write a sentence fragment for example rather than writing that this writer was born in this year. You can just write born 1923 that's it two words and you're good to go. Save your time and save your space kahaniya nahi likhne hai this is what you have to understand a lot of students copy and paste stories from spark notes and other short summary websites and they keep on writing whatever is written on screen that isn't making notes that's just being a photocopy machine. So ensure that you don't become a photocopy machine instead you become a smart note taking aspirant. Now a lot of people ask me Arpita how do we use colors in order to make our notes because colors have a very very different impact on the brain. Now using color is a purely personal choice. There can be some people who use it and there can be people who just use one colored pen. Some people don't even need it. Most of my friends use black and blue pens and they score amazing marks. But I when I was preparing for net used colors because colors help me retain information better. For example you can use different colors while writing about different sections of a particular writer. If you are talking about the biography you can write it from one color. You can talk about literary contribution of the writer and you can use it another color. You can talk about a significant work of a writer and use a third color. You can keep the color coding uniform across all the writers so that whenever you see a paragraph written in a particular color your brain automatically gets a message that you are talking about a particular topic like biography ke liye blue color. So all the writers biography will be written in blue. So whenever you see something in blue it automatically gets reflected in your brain that you are talking about biography of a writer. So color coding is very very important. Now similar to color coding is highlighting. Some people use highlighters when they are making notes. Before I talk about how you can use highlighting as a tool to get marks I want to plead you that please don't highlight everything when you are reading books. So when you are reading books and jotting down points some people have this habit of highlighting the entire page. A lot of people would find I would find that they highlight the entire notes. Try to highlight only important facts or point that you know that you always forget or that are very important from exam point of view. Let's say you are done with making notes and now you are revising for the first time. So now what you can do is you can use a highlighter and highlight the sections which you cannot recall at all. Alternatively you can use symbols like stars or hash to show a point which you always forget. Now when you will be doing this again and again why at the time you reach the final revision state you will see that there are a list of pointers that you have to keep on revising to ensure that they stick to your brain. So that is how highlighting and color coding helps. Now moving on to the next tip that is using mnemonics. For example when you are making notes for a play like Hamlet then rather than writing the entire story in paragraph you can either make a diagram of it and when you make a diagrammatic representation of Hamlet the story gets into your brain much easier. I have done so many videos on YouTube talking about how you can use mind math to get these information in your brain. Please check out my video on Jane Iyer wherein I have used mind map and shown you how you can use it to remember complex novels and stories and how these mind maps will help you to remember stuff better. So our memory is photogenic friends you have to understand this. So whenever you use mind maps or mnemonics then those things get stored much quicker. Let's say some writer's date and month matches your or your friend's birthday. Make sure that you use it as a point so that you don't remember those important dates. That is how mnemonics and other mind mapping tools help you to retain information. Friends coming on to the next trick use sticky notes all around your room. Repetition is the key to remember things. Do you notice how you remember the lyrics of the song you hear on Instagram Reels? Not because you have memorized the lyrics but because you have heard them so many times. When you keep scrolling Instagram that is how you remember it. So repetition is the key. Similarly as much as you see these sticky notes these pointers on your wall these pointers are going to stay in your brain. While I was studying I used to paste sticky notes on my room's wall and I used to reach them. And I swear you won't even realize how you will automatically start remembering these pointers which you are writing on the sticky notes provided you are reading these sticky notes again and again. Laga ke bool jaoge toh how will you remember? Understand. Along with these six tips I have got two bonus tips for you. Number one when you are revising your notes keep a separate notebook with you and keep adding points to that notebook which you keep on forgetting every time you revise. So if you are revising a page and you found that out of that particular page there are two points that you are forgetting every time you are trying to revise. And write down these two points in another separate notebook. This will make an exhaustive list of points that you always forget and you can spend two three hours right before the exam revising these tricky points so that you remember them on the day of the exam. You must understand that it is highly impossible to go through each page of your notes right before the exam and therefore it is super important to have concise notes in your hands. The second bonus tip is that the more you read your notes the better you will remember and therefore you should make it a habit that you remember and revise your notes everyday. You know when I was preparing for UGC net exam every day before reading any new topic I would spend at least 30 minutes revising my previous notes and the same habit you should develop wherein you keep revising your previous notes before you pick up anything new. If you don't revise you will keep forgetting what you have already done and all your efforts will be wasted. And with this we have reached to the end of this lecture. I would love it if you guys can comment down below what note making strategy do you use when preparing for UGC net exam. So with that note I would like to take your leave if you have any questions any doubt don't forget to put that in the comment section below. Also you can WhatsApp us on the number given in the description box and we will be more than happy to help you. So with that note I would like to take your leave that's it from my side for this video lecture. We will meet soon in the next video lecture till the time we meet next happy learning keep loving literature and stay tuned to arpitakarwa.com