Painters often tone a blank canvas with a wash of umber or neutral gray before they make a single mark. This initial layer exists to break the anxiety of making the first stroke on a stark surface. Artists understand that the nature of their workspace fundamentally dictates how they go forth with their craft. In the same way, one’s choice of note-taking surfaces changes how they engage with the process of taking notes.
To break the standard of academic record-keeping, notetakers should abandon the formal book layout and use legal pads. The vertically bound, starchy yellow format is uniquely tailored for the true purpose of note-taking: processing new information.
In class, it is tempting to try and collect every piece of the influx of fresh knowledge you’re receiving. The reasoning goes: write it all down to ensure that if anything slips your mind, it’s not lost; you’ve pinned it down, secured it for all of eternity. This is the tendency of a transcriber, the student who fears losing certain bits of information lest they enact revenge on test day.
Transcribing is misguided. Its basis is the will to completely record, secure and possess learning. This is a response to a reasonable anxiety that academic success is endangered by gaps in one’s understanding of class material; the resulting note-taking method is meant to produce a maximally comprehensive record of class content. Under this logic, crafting what essentially amounts to a reference guide or textbook in service of that future self cramming for a midterm seems rational. Transcribing might be the standard note-taking approach, but the method has hidden drawbacks.
Writing is a proven memory aid, but in capturing everything for fear of losing anything, the notetaker is forced to weigh all information equally. In committing to tracking everything, you lose the ability to process the material you’re frantically transcribing. Following along word for word precludes thoughtful parsing of the lecture, which requires taking a bird’s-eye view of the class to determine what content is important: where the turns are, what information is contextual and what is key.
Transcribing is fatiguing and compounds unnecessary pressure on the note taker. It is mentally and physically difficult to follow a lecture while practically creating a lecture for yourself. The transcriber might observe a decline in the quality or neatness of their notes over the duration of class and over the duration of the semester — a reflection of the accretion of fatigue inherent to the project of transcribing. Your notebook or digital folder becomes a reference guide in the making. From the first page, a standard is set forth to be maintained through to the last. After all, your goal is to create something intelligible for future reference. So while the transcriber is bound to process information on the instructor’s terms by copying down a recreation of their thoughts, they are also beckoned away from consolidating their understanding by bearing the compounding pressure of a long-term project.
There is already scrutiny on tablet and laptop note-taking; the critique I have laid forth also encompasses spiral-bound notebooks and composition notebooks. In their format as horizontally bound with front and back covers, these notebooks make one thing clear: they are not simply paper. A notebook is a book you are beholden to write. This is why the spiral-bound disposes the notetaker to the time-compounding pressure of reference-guide-making, and why the different formats of spiral-bound and legal pads have important consequences.
The legal pad rescues us from the regime of record keeping. Denoted as ‘legal,’ this technology is simply a pad of lined paper sold at the Huntley Bookstore with larger 8 ½-by-11 ¾ dimensions and traditionally dyed yellow. A vertical stack bound at the top, the sheets of a legal pad are harder to search through, and the pages are easily torn away or flipped behind the cover, giving them an ephemeral quality.
The legal pad teaches us to see that our will to capture information by transcribing in as great a quantity as our hands can muster is unhelpful. The legal pad does not coerce you to keep a record; its form counters that instinct. Where spiral-bound notebooks subjugate you as the beleaguered scribe of their sequentially sanctified pages, the sheets of the legal pad offer themselves as disposable servants of your thought process. When you flip a sheet over, it simply disappears; if you really want to find it later, you could, but for now it gives way.
The legal pad frees the writer from the archival expectation because writing on a legal pad is purely mind on paper, not a book template. It enables you to write what strikes you, what puzzles you, what lingers. Note-taking with a pad of paper is hearing, processing, absorbing.
Your notes are not a handcrafted textbook or a calligraphy showcase. Notepads are ultimately just a technology to support listening, so whatever device you use, make sure it helps you absorb material.
Luca Davis PZ ’27 has completed his visionary tripartite on education and now turns his attention to the 2027 LEGO Star Wars leaks.
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