Ascent-Notemaking

Some ideas to organize information for CSE Mains and prelims.

The essence of note making is that 

Firstly one should have maximum relevant information stored at a common place and secondly this requisite of information to serve as key in revision.

What I did was I divided a notebook according to the mains syllabus and whenever I found any information useful I added that in the required section. For example, Take a 300 page notebook and divide it into 4 papers and then label within each paper the parts of syllabus. Now if you come across the news of military coup in Turkey, open the page of international relations and add the information there. This way information gets organized.

Further you can make sub labels also. For example you can divide international relations as Middle east, South Asia, Latin America Asia etc. One thing that can be done to divide the entire syllabus is go through website of a news broadcaster say BBC or The Hindu and see how they have sectionalized the content. Whatever you find simpler to you adopt that approach. The essence is getting the bulk of information organized. INDEX at the start is a must!

Now when this is done the biggest question is what to include in notes. For example: You come across the news of flood in a district. The information that has to be included would go in Paper 3 disaster management label and it would not be just a copy of the news that Flood in Kerala, XYZ dead. NO. What you have to add is the district affected, the river which overflowed, what steps did the district administration take, which teams were deployed for rescue and so on.

Notes should give you what, why, how, where and when of the event/incident.

The exact pattern of note making can be done online using One note or other software.

For NCERT's and optional I used the side margins of books to make flowcahrts or arrowheads containing in bullet the information contained on the page. This way time is saved in revision. Also if I came across any information in a book I used to get the page photocopied and stuck in my base notes. I did the same for factual articles in newspapers.

I hope this helps. All the best.