Everywhere I go, I carry around an array of colored pens in my backpack.  Yeah, they do make my notes look nice – I’m not going to deny that colored-coded notes are really visually pleasing – but that’s not the most important reason why I take the time to write out my notes in all the colors of the rainbow.

Color-coding notes and notecards can really help you to streamline your thinking, draw connections between different aspects of your topic, and improve your retention of what you are writing.

Firstly, color-coding allows you to categorize visually. If you’ve ever learned a language, chances are that when you went through the vocabulary acquisition stage of learning your teacher had you make color-coded notecards. Studies such as the one linked below show that assigning different colors to specific grammatical features (possibly parts of speech like nouns=blue, adjective=yellow, etc.) enhances your ability to store or encode the information in your brain and later to retrieve it more successfully.

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/10026

The act of taking your class notes and color-coding them does take more time than just writing them out in black or blue pen. When many people see my color-coded notes, they often marvel at how pretty they look, but also at how much time they must have taken me to color-code. I’ve had people tell me that the extra time I spend switching between colors is a waste of time. However, that extra time spent while creating my notes pays off in dividends later when I am studying for an exam.

When I slow down a bit to color-code my notes, I am not simply writing out words manually, I am actively engaging my mind in the action. To color-code effectively, you are forced to make connections between the information you are writing down. In educational psychology, drawing ties between information is the single most important way to ensure that your studying is effective and that the information you are learning will be well-encoded in your brain. So, by taking this time to color-code as I am crafting my notes, when I go back later in order to study for an exam, I tend to remember the material a lot more clearly than if I had just written it all more quickly in black.

On the tests themselves, my color-coding also really helps. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of doodling in your notes a flower or something, and then being able to sort of visualize the text around that doodle when you are thinking back to your notes during the test. With color-coding it’s very similar. The visual aesthetic of the colors can be helpful for visualizing your notes when you are trying to recall information on the test.

And – knowing this might not apply to everyone – I think color-coding is also just fun and relaxing. You get to slow down and your notes look really nice afterwards. But besides this, color-coding can be really practical and can help you to improve your memory for the topic and save you study time later.