I got a STEM degree in the early 1990s, and my usual note taking style was in the same vein: I used four colours of pen, a straightedge for lines, and tried to

I got a STEM degree in the early 1990s, and my usual note taking style was in the same vein: I used four colours of pen, a straightedge for lines, and tried to make nicely presentable notes that I would not have to make alterations to after the lecture. In retrospect I think this was completely insane. I was so preoccupied with the mundane details of layout and presentation that many of the important technical details the professors were talking about went right by me. I'm amazed I managed to get by with this style. One of the courses I did best in was one for which the blackboard presentation was drawn from the textbook, and in that one I did not bother with the elaborate note taking, just relied on the textbook. For some reason I never made the connection between me doing unusually well in that course and the fact that I wasn't distracted by note taking. If I were to do it all over again I would make my notes merely capture the information (and if I knew the information was in my text, just capture enough to identify where), and if I really wanted beautifully laid out notes I would rewrite them after class, with the added benefit that the rewriting would be an implicit review.