The Secret Language of Comics

For this Sunday Sketch, I made my chemistry lecture into a visual note. This page is mainly on the topic of Wave Particle Duality. The note is divided into two parts, particles and waves. The drawings and notes are all illustrations that demonstrate the explanations of the proofs for why light is both a particle and a wave.

After completing this assignment, I realized it has helped me to visualize the information and keep a better memory in my mind. I better understand information when I look at images instead of words. With these notes, it makes it easier for me to memorize the key concepts. At the same time, I found the process enjoyable, and it had more variety compared to writing notes with only words.

Link to Prompt

Doing a visual sketch made me feel as if I was wasting my time.I’m used to taking notes in a certain style, so changing it up kind of made me forget some of the material because I was focusing more on the visual component than on memorizing it. For the visual aspect, it looks very pleasing and peaceful because I was drawing, yet it was tedious. Yet overall, it was enjoyable to watch my notes come to life with color and animation. 

This is a photo of my visual notes for psychology class. It goes through the process of research where each step is important for accurately determining a opinion. For example, if someone thinks “When do babies start to see in color?”, one would follow these steps to design an appropriate research method to figure the question out.

Drawing these visual notes helped engrave them better in my memory. When recalling the steps, I now associate them to each photos I drew, and from there I can figure out the next step. However, thinking of diagrams to draw for each step took quite a while and the process to design them also took a good amount of time since I am not the best at drawing. Although it was a fun exercise, I don’t see myself taking visual notes for future studying.

My visual note is about brain structures and function in the psychology class. Visual notes allow me to simplify complex ideas and concepts into easily digestible visuals. This process can help me gain a better understanding of the course content by breaking it down into vivid images and examples. Since concepts such as Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia are quite similar but different in some ways, I can use some daily situations to illustrates these concepts. The drawing process was enjoyable, as it tapped into my creativity in an academic context. I also realized that visual notes can serve as valuable study aids since they less overwhelming than sifting through pages of text.

Photo Credits: Sagar Thapar

The visual note-taking experience was a lot more helpful than I expected. I originally thought the doodles would be a waste of time, but surprisingly the doodles helped me understand the concepts better. I think this note-taking method can be very helpful in learning complex parts of a course’s syllabus because I am a visual learner, but it is time-consuming because I am not a skilled artist. Originally, I think I was overthinking what to draw because I am so used to structured notes. However, once I stopped overthinking and just doodled I started to see faster results. I think allowing yourself to doodle concepts allows you to truly test your brain’s understanding of the concept and can be a good self-assessment. If I were to repeat this process I would stress less and just see what my brain can come up with on its own. I think the next time I would use this process would be when I have a midterm or final in a class to give myself a different medium to understand the concepts.

Creating this week’s Sunday sketch made me realize how effective a method of studying that visual note-taking is. I was able to gauge how well I understood the material from one of Biology lectures and being able to explain it through a visual method was good practice. I may even add this exercise on a smaller scale, to my usual study habits. I found that being able to turn concepts from words to visuals is a true test to your comprehension of material. I found it enjoyable drawing this week’s sketch because it’s something I haven’t yet tried. It made me feel like one of those sketch YouTubers lol. 

For visual note-taking, I took notes on the major mass extinctions and the Cambrian explosion from BIOL 141. This activity was particularly helpful for realizing and understanding chronological events. I learned that I tend to memorize words without necessarily understanding the ideas themselves. Using visual note-taking, I was able to better understand how each event impacted the others and how they related to each other. I also prefer to use less colors. I only used my black Pilot-G2 pen, red Energel pen, and green Power Line 25000 highlighter for this assignment. More colors were distracting and took away from the understanding of the concept. I used the red to mark any important points and the highlighter to mark headers.

I don’t find visual note-taking to be my preferred note-taking method. I prefer to write and memorize the material, then find real-world applications, rather than trying to mix conceptualizing and memorizing at the same time. Yet, this activity will be very useful when I am trying to memorize and study chronological events.

Assignment Link: https://engrd101f23.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-3-visual-note-taking/

September 8th, 2023

I’m in the habit of typing all my notes in a google doc so I was worried about trying to convert them into illustrations. Luckily, my biology class has been covering the process of cell division and how to identify the stage of the cell cycle just from a photo. Because of this, converting my notes from words to drawings helped me retain the information better because it forced me to visualize the process. When I was reviewing the blog post for this assignment, I saw a suggestion to use a flowchart which was a very effective layout for the notes I had. I enjoyed the process more than I expected because it was quite satisfying mapping out the structure for my drawing and seeing it all come together in the end.