A Defense of Bullet Points

March 10, 2017

Have you ever thought about the way you take notes? If I had to take a guess, I would say you most likely take down bullet points. It has always been a no-brainer for me that everyone simply jots down bullet points in class, half paying attention to the teacher and half calculating a way to stealthily go on their phone. Even the word “jotted,” a word that I could come up with no translation for when I talked this over with one of my professors, feels strange in the Italian university context. “To jot something down” literally just means to write something down quickly and concisely, which in my mind is entirely the purpose of a note. Bullet points capture the main argument and allow a student to move on to new material quicker. But Italian students do not take bullet point notes.


My first class at the University of Florence was last Thursday, a rather late start for a university’s spring semester compared to Georgetown’s calendar. I went to class terrified that I would not be able to understand the teacher or that the other Italian kids would instantly know that I was American and, for whatever reason, look down upon me for that reason. After the initial 15 minutes, I slowly started to relax, as I realized that I could follow the gist of the class and that I would not be drowning in Italian for the next few months. I took down some notes here and there, still trying to make sense of certain phrases, when I noticed that my notebook and the notebooks of those around me looked different. Where I had sparse words and phrases in a neat column aligned to the left side of the page, the notebooks around me were filled with paragraphs upon paragraphs of notes. Many had even copied down word for word what the professor had said, reading like neatly written monologues on their pages. Even though I normally feel extremely uncomfortable when people read my notes over my shoulder, I couldn’t help but glance over at the notes of the people surrounding me. How had they all chosen to do this strange, intensive method of note taking without communicating with each other? Had our professor said something at the beginning of class that I missed?

Shrugging it off, I went to a second class that day, and the same thing occurred. People typed at the speed of lightning, making sure to get every last word of the professor’s down before moving on. I felt subconscious of my bullet points because they revealed not only my outsider status, but also my inferiority. I couldn’t take down everything the professor said. I was not quick enough, and I also could not catch every word with the same ease that the Italian students could. Feeling the need to blend, I tried switching to this dictation style of note-taking. I felt my attention span grow stronger as I tried to keep up with the professor, but I also would find myself quickly discouraged when I missed a word and my sentence lost all its meaning.

Watching the Italian student’s fingers fly across their keyboards or drag down their page as they raced our professor, I realized that this must just be the way they have always taken notes. Somewhere from an early age on, they learned that the teacher holds the information. and it is their job as the student to take it all in. Before starting my classes, we had been warned that Italian professors would not be like American professors. They talk for their allotted two hours and usually do not take questions. But I had not realized at the time that the role of the student would also be different. Instead of participating in direct discourse with the professor, students here actively learn by absorbing as much as possible and reproducing it onto a page. The professor is here to talk, and the student is here to record.

At my level of Italian so far, it is still easier for me to take down bullet points to keep up with the arguments of the class instead of taking dictation from my teacher. But nonetheless, I am in awe of the Italian students. While American students are wired to synthesize information and reproduce it concisely, Italian students are trained to take in as much as possible so that they will have all of the material when they need to go back and look at it. With my American bias, I still see the benefit of the bullet over the paragraph, but we will see what four months of Italian university does to me.
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