General ⇒ Managing notes for Nursing Courses

[fleetadmiral73]

Hi all,

I start nursing school this January, and am looking to bolster my note taking. I'm very confident in my handwritten notes, but I'm afraid they may be too time consuming for all the notes I'm going to have to write and review. It can be assumed that typed notes are a given here.

Anyway, I'm looking at how I want to write and manage the notes. Traditionally I have used Word and OO.org, but formatting differences between home and school computers gets annoying. I'm ready to use LaTeX, but I'm unsure how I want to organize my notes. Much of my notes will follow a structure similar to

Quarter
Course Number
Module
Specific Section of Module (Learning Objectives) (This would probably be one text file)
The numbered questions themselves (rather, the answers)

Obviously I'm going to use txt files and folder hierarchies to help manage, but here I'm unsure where to go. I'm pretty sure I want each text file to cover one specific section (seems logical because it covers a specific topic, but is usually only a few pages long, and so is more reasonable then a whole module in a txt file).

Within the text file, I'm unsure what sectioning commands to use. Do I want to start at the top, and have each question be a section, with the answers as subsections? Something I may want to do later is merge all the modules from one class (at the end of the quarter, for example), so maybe it would be better to start with the smallest sectioning commands (use the answers as paragraph, reserving subparagraph for really long answers).

I've included the answers to one specific section of a module, which is usually the smallest "unit" I think in when organizing notes, since smaller than that is an actual question. This would be the contents of a single text file, I think.

I'm also a bit unsure on where it makes sense to use lists, vs. where to use different paragraphs. Say each text file contains answers to 10 questions...does it even make sense to use the sectioning commands, or would a simple list suffice? I think here taking a look at my attached document would be helpful, since I don't think I know enough about LaTeX to use good organization, but I do want to stick with a format and not have to re-do it cause I started w/o knowing what I was doing.

I would be happy to clarify anything, but I hope its pretty clear. To restate my request, I'm looking for information on what sectioning commands I should use for my notes, with regard to maybe merging them later at the end of a quarter.