Note-taking methods that work for the SQE

Most SQE notes are too long to be useful. If your notes for a single topic run to four pages of near-verbatim text lifted from a course manual, you haven't made notes, you've made a slower, harder-to-search copy of the manual.

Good SQE notes do something different. They compress a topic down to what you'd actually need to recall mid-exam, and they get you working with the material as you write, not just typing while your brain idles.

There's no single "correct" format here. What matters is a few study-science principles that separate notes that help you recall a rule from notes that just look tidy on a shelf.

Why transcription is the weakest form of note-taking

Writing down everything you hear or read, word for word, feels productive. Pen's moving, pages are filling up. But transcription asks little of your brain beyond hearing and copying, and that shallow processing is why it tends to produce weaker recall than notes that force you to select and restructure the material.

A frequently cited study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published in Psychological Science in 2014, compared students taking longhand notes with students typing on laptops during lectures. The laptop group wrote more, often close to verbatim transcripts. The longhand group wrote less but had to paraphrase as they went, since handwriting is slower than typing. On tests of conceptual understanding, the longhand group did better despite capturing less content overall.

The lesson isn't "always write by hand." Condensing and rephrasing, not the tool in your hand, is what does the work. You can type notes that condense, and handwrite notes that are just slow transcription.

This matters for SQE prep because the volume is large. Most prep providers and candidates put total SQE1 preparation somewhere in the region of 300 to 500 hours across the syllabus, though the SRA doesn't prescribe a fixed figure and your own number will depend on your starting point. If a meaningful share of those hours goes into transcribing rather than processing, you're spending real time for a smaller return than it feels like at the time.

Dual coding: pairing words with a visual structure

Dual coding is the idea, developed from Allan Paivio's work on how memory represents information, that we retain material better when it's encoded both verbally and visually rather than as text alone. Richard Mayer's research on multimedia learning built on this, finding that pairing words with a relevant diagram or spatial layout tends to produce better recall than words alone, provided the visual is genuinely connected to the content rather than decorative.

You don't need to be a designer for this. For SQE notes, dual coding can mean:

• Turning a multi-step legal test into a small flowchart instead of a paragraph.
• Using a simple table for a comparison (thresholds, time limits, categories) instead of running text.
• Sketching a short timeline for a process that unfolds in stages.

The point isn't pretty notes. A rule with several conditions is often easier to hold in memory as a small diagram than as a paragraph, because you're storing its shape as well as its wording. At roughly the one minute forty seconds per question that SQE1's pace works out to, a structure you can picture is often quicker to recall than a sentence you have to reconstruct word by word.

Condensing: the real skill behind good notes

Condensing means taking a source, a chapter, a video, a set of slides, and deciding what actually needs to survive into your revision notes, in your own words, at a fraction of the length. It's the step most students skip, because it takes longer than it looks like it should.

A workable approach:

1. First pass, understand only. Read or watch the material once without writing much. The goal is comprehension, not capture.
2. Second pass, write from memory. Close the source and write down what you remember of the structure and key rules. This is already active recall doing some of the work.
3. Check and fill gaps. Go back to the source only to fix what you got wrong or missed, not to re-copy what you already had right.
4. Cut hard. If a sentence doesn't help you answer a question or explain the rule to someone else, it's probably filler.

This is slower than transcribing in the moment, but it front-loads processing you'd otherwise repeat every time you reread notes trying to work out what mattered.

The difference between active and passive notes isn't really about format. Cornell layouts, mind maps, and linear lists can all be either. Passive notes involve copying: the source does the organising, you just relocate it. Active notes require a decision at each step: what's the core rule, what's the exception. A practical test: if you could make a set of notes while thinking about something else entirely, they were probably passive.

A simple structure that supports all of this

You don't need to overhaul your system. A structure that supports condensing and dual coding without extra effort:

• Heading: the topic or rule, one line.
• Core rule or test, condensed to a sentence or two, in your own words.
• A diagram, flowchart, or table if the rule has multiple steps or a comparison built in.
• One or two short triggers that help you recognise the rule in a fact pattern.
• A gap or question mark where you're not confident, so your notes double as a revision to-do list.

Notes that only record what you understood are less useful than notes that also flag what you didn't.

Turning notes into recall practice

Notes on their own don't build memory, using them does. Once a topic is condensed into structured, dual-coded notes, the highest-value next step is to close them and try to reproduce the rule, diagram included, from memory. Condensed notes make that easy, because there's little enough on the page for reconstructing it to be a genuine test.

If you want the visual side covered in more depth, see visual techniques for reading dense SQE material, which pairs well with the condensing approach above. A free SQE study planner can help you block condensing time separately from recall time, rather than letting note-taking eat the hours meant for testing yourself.

The takeaway

Long notes that transcribe a source feel thorough but tend to under-deliver on exam day, because they ask little of your memory while you make them. Notes that condense a topic to its core rule, add a visual structure where the material has real shape, and get made through active decisions rather than copying, serve you better both while studying and in the exam.

For more on building an SQE1 study routine, see the rest of the blog, including how pass rates break down by cohort if you're weighing how much prep time to budget.

Frequently asked questions

What's the best note-taking method for the SQE? There's no single required format. What helps is condensing material into your own words rather than transcribing it, adding a visual structure such as a flowchart or table where a rule has multiple steps, and making notes through active decisions about what matters rather than by copying a source.

Should I type or handwrite my SQE notes? Either can work. Research comparing longhand and laptop note-taking (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014) found longhand notes were often shorter and more paraphrased, which correlated with better understanding, while laptop notes tended to be closer to verbatim transcripts. Format matters less than whether you're condensing as you go.

What is dual coding and why does it help with SQE revision? Dual coding is the idea that combining words with a relevant visual tends to produce better recall than words alone, because the information gets encoded two ways rather than one. For SQE notes, that can mean turning a multi-step legal test into a small diagram, so you're storing the shape of the rule as well as its wording.

How long should SQE notes be? Shorter than most students expect. If your notes are close in length to the source material, they're likely transcription rather than condensing. Notes dense enough to reread in a few minutes tend to be more useful than long documents you rarely reopen.

How do I stop my notes turning into transcription? Read or watch the source once for understanding before writing anything. Then close it and write what you remember, checking back only to fix gaps or errors. That order naturally produces shorter, more active notes than writing while the source sits open in front of you.