The flip side of not being able to make your own notes for your own learning is that you are less likely to read as much as you should. Independent learners must be people who are willing to read. They do not expect information to be given to them on a platter. They explore what they are interested in or what is important to them. They are seldom told what to learn. They decide what is to be learned.

But the absence of note-taking skills in anyone will deter him from making his own explorations. Text  becomes a chore because they would not know how to process what they read as they are so used to be given everything in neat bulleted form. This addiction to ready-made processed notes means that they cannot process and organize information on their own.  Reading would be difficult and a time-wasting chore because what is read is quickly forgotten without good processing of the information.For this reason, non-note-takers are poor readers.

A good note-taker knows that good processing of the information requires him to interact with the information, sifting out what is important from the unimportant, and organizing them so that it makes sense to him as he understands it. A lot of thinking is required and it is this thinking that will re-wire the neurons in the brain cells and help the brain make sense of what is read. This process is important because information only becomes deep knowledge to someone only if the person himself has processed the information. Reading ready-made notes processed by someone else makes it harder for the information to become deep knowledge. The reader of someone else’s notes only becomes a superficial learner.

The non-note-taker is a superficial learner because he does not undergo a richer learning process. He is only interested in an end product, not the process. The sifting and organizing of the information from the reading he would otherwise have to do himself are important cognitive processes that makes his understanding deeper. Worse, he will always be dependent on others. His learning will be crippled. He will nto be a successful life-long learner.