Carefully underlined headings, harmonious colours, flawless diagrams and perfect handwriting: for many pupils and students, making summary notes is an essential step in revising. But behind these perfectly organised pages there is sometimes a trap: spending so much time preparing your study materials that there isn’t enough left to actually learn.
Three hours of work, a beautiful summary… and then what?
It is 5 pm. Emma, a university student, sits down at her desk to revise a biology chapter. She rereads her course, then writes a summary: she selects the important information, rephrases some definitions, creates tables and uses several colours to distinguish the concepts.
By 8 pm, the result is flawless: eight clear, well structured and pleasant pages. Emma feels she has worked well.
But what if we now asked her to close her notes and explain the main mechanisms of the chapter? Perhaps she could recall a good part of it. Perhaps, on the contrary, she would discover that she doesn’t master the material as well as she thought.
Because producing an excellent revision tool and learning effectively are two different activities. This is exactly where summary notes can become misleading.
The pleasure of producing something concrete
Summary notes have one undeniable quality: they give a visible shape to the work done.
After two hours of exercises, a student may feel they haven’t made much progress: there are still unanswered questions, mistakes to correct, ideas to explore further. After two hours of summarising, they have several carefully written pages. The result is tangible.
This difference influences how we perceive productivity. We like to see our work moving forward: ticking off a task, finishing a document, closing a chapter. But learning does not always produce such visible results. Understanding a line of reasoning, consolidating knowledge or developing an automatic skill often takes a lot of effort without leaving any physical trace.
That is why some preparation activities are so tempting: they give a feeling of progress, while sometimes being less demanding than checking what you really know.
Enjoying making beautiful notes is not a problem. The problem appears when the quality of the document becomes more important than the knowledge it is supposed to help you acquire.
Summary notes are not proof of mastery
A pupil has to learn the stages of cell division. To prepare for the exam, they make a summary sheet with the different phases, their characteristics and the matching diagrams. By doing this, they reread the material, select and organise the information: this already contributes to learning.
But nothing guarantees they will be able to find this information again a few days later. When they look at their notes, the answers are right in front of them: they easily recognise an idea and feel they know it. When they have to explain the phases without any support, they have to retrieve the information from memory themselves.
This distinction between recognising information and being able to recall it is fundamental. Research in the science of learning shows the value of active recall: trying to retrieve information from memory rather than simply rereading it. It can take several forms:
- answering questions;
- doing exercises;
- explaining an idea out loud (we describe this method in why explaining helps you understand better);
- redrawing a diagram without looking at your notes.
Summary notes can therefore be an excellent starting point. But they become truly useful when you use them to learn, not just when you make them.
The perfectionism trap
One colour for definitions, another for examples, boxes for formulas, perfectly aligned headings: some people take extreme care over the presentation of their study materials.
This care is not useless. A clear structure makes understanding easier, highlights the links between ideas and makes revising more pleasant. But it sometimes takes up a disproportionate amount of time. Starting a page again because a heading is badly written, spending twenty minutes choosing a layout or copying out an entire summary to make it prettier usually adds almost nothing to your mastery of the subject.
Perfectionism then becomes a form of procrastination that is particularly hard to spot. Unlike someone who spends the afternoon on their phone, the student polishing their notes is really working. They are focused, diligent, sometimes even exhausted at the end of the day. Yet they may have spent much of their time on activities with limited learning benefit.
A task that takes a lot of time and effort is not necessarily the best way to learn. So the question is worth asking: am I improving my understanding, or just the presentation of my notes?
So should you give up summary notes?
Certainly not. Summary notes fulfil several important functions:
- They force you to select information. Faced with a fifty page course, identifying what matters requires understanding the structure of the material and distinguishing main ideas from details.
- They help you make connections. A comparison table, a diagram or a mind map makes visible relationships that are hard to see in continuous text.
- They are a practical tool for later revision.
How effective they are, however, depends on how you design and use them. Copying out a chapter almost word for word is less useful than rephrasing concepts, ranking them and linking them together, as with good note-taking. And notes that contain absolutely everything in the course lose part of their purpose.
Good summary notes are not necessarily short or beautiful: they are suited to their purpose. Depending on the subject, that might be a comparison table, a diagram, a few formulas or a list of questions. And sometimes, the best revision tool is simply not a summary sheet at all.
What if you learned first, then summarised?
Summarising is often seen as a preliminary step: first you prepare your notes, then you study. That is not always the most effective order. You can partly reverse the process.
After discovering a chapter, close your book and try to rebuild the main ideas on a blank sheet of paper:
- what are the main concepts?
- how are they linked?
- which definitions can you recall?
- which points are still unclear?
Then open your book again to check, fill in what you forgot and correct your mistakes. The summary then becomes both a memory exercise and an organising tool.
A student finishing an economics chapter on supply and demand can, instead of copying out the definitions and graphs from the course notes, try to draw the curves themselves, explain how they work and recall the factors that shift them. What they cannot recall shows them exactly what they need to work on again.
This method does not suit completely new material you have not yet understood. But once you have a first understanding, it makes preparing summary notes much more active.
Time spent summarising is time not spent practising
This may be the most important point, especially as exams approach. Study time is limited. An hour spent improving a summary is an hour not spent doing exercises, practising on past exam questions or checking what you have remembered.
For a very theoretical course, building a summary can be a useful part of the work. But in maths, physics or accounting, spending most of your revision copying out formulas and methods without applying them is a problem. Knowing how to solve an equation does not mean you can solve it correctly. Knowing a grammar rule does not guarantee you will use it spontaneously in conversation.
Knowledge needs to be put to use in concrete situations. So you need to set aside enough time for exercises, applications and self-assessment, and build them in from the start when you plan your studies. Summary notes can make these activities easier. They must not replace them. It is in fact one of the common mistakes when revising.
Imperfect notes can be an excellent tool
Now imagine another student. Her summary is less pretty: some information is handwritten, arrows link the concepts, annotations fill the margins and several questions are circled. At first glance, her document looks less finished.
Yet these imperfections reflect real intellectual work. The arrows show she looked for connections. The annotations, that she rephrased certain passages. The circled questions, what she still needs to explore. If she then uses these notes to test herself, hide the answers or rebuild the reasoning, she turns them into a genuine learning tool.
Messy notes are of course not better than tidy ones. But the value of a summary is measured neither by how beautiful it is nor by the time spent making it. It is measured by what it helps you understand, remember and reuse.
This is an important distinction to pass on to pupils and students. In My Sherpa’s support in study skills , one of the aims is precisely to help everyone identify the strategies that really make them learn, rather than repeating habits that only give the impression of working. Because two students can spend the same number of hours revising and get very different benefits from it.
Next time you finish a summary…
Before putting away your highlighters and moving on to the next chapter, take a few minutes. Close your notes. Try to recall the main ideas, explain the most important concepts without looking, do an exercise or answer a few questions.
You may find that your summary has already helped you understand the material well. Or that you still have work to do to master it. Either way, these few minutes will give you valuable information about your learning.
And if you have to choose between spending half an hour polishing notes that are already clear and using that time to practise, the second option will usually pay off more.
Summary notes don’t need to be perfect. Above all, they should help you be ready on the day you no longer have your course in front of you.
Getting support
Does your child spend hours preparing for revision, yet the results don’t follow? At My Sherpa, an educational advisor first takes stock with you, then chooses a coach who helps your child rethink the way they study: useful notes, exercises, self-assessment and organisation. Private tutoring takes place at home anywhere in Belgium, or online.
