It is 9:15, you are in the lecture hall, the professor is talking fast, changing slides every twenty seconds, and you are already lost. You held on for the first sentence, started writing, got stuck on the spelling of a word, looked up, and the professor had already moved on. You stare at your notebook: a half-sentence, a crossed-out word, an arrow pointing nowhere. You start the next line telling yourself this time you will keep up. Two minutes later, same story.

If you are dyslexic, dyspraxic, or ADHD, this scene is your daily life. The problem is not your intelligence. The problem is not your motivation. The problem is that you are being asked to do three things at once: listen, understand, and write. And writing, when you are dyslexic or ADHD, is the part that drains you. You spend your fuel on the mechanics of the sentence, and you have nothing left for the meaning.

Why classic note-taking breaks when you are dyslexic or ADHD

Standard note-taking assumes you can listen and write in parallel without one eating the other. For a neurotypical student, it is already a demanding exercise. For you, it is a dual task that pushes you into overload within the first two minutes.

When you are dyslexic, every word costs you a check on the shape, the order of the letters, the ending. When you have ADHD, your attention drifts at the smallest sound in the room, and once it is gone, bringing it back to the lecturer’s voice takes thirty seconds you do not have. In both cases, you end up choosing: write or understand. You write, you stop understanding. You listen, you have no trace of what was said.

By the end of the term, you have notebooks full of gaps, or full of words you never re-read because decoding them is too painful. You put in double the hours at night trying to reconstruct what happened, and three days before the exam you still do not have a clean study support.

The one accommodation that actually helps: take writing out of the live moment

The most useful accommodation for a dyslexic or ADHD student is not to write faster. It is to stop writing live at all. If you can record the lecture and get the text later, you free your attention for what matters: following the argument, asking questions, understanding.

In most countries and universities, recording is an accepted accommodation for students with a learning difference. Your disability services office can add it to your accommodation plan, usually with a short letter from a doctor or a psychologist. Once that is in place, you can put your phone at the front of the room and just listen.

Cosmonote: from audio to a lecture you can read

This is where a tool like Cosmonote becomes a quiet prosthetic. You start the recording at the beginning of the lecture, place your phone, and follow the class. At the end of the hour, you get two things: a full transcript of what was said and a structured summary that splits the lecture into sections.

The huge difference for a dyslexic reader is that the text you read afterwards is clean. No typos to decode, no half-finished words, no arrows lost in the margin. You have a readable support you can go through at your own pace, highlight, paste into your flashcards. You can even have your phone read it aloud with the built-in accessibility voice if reading stays hard.

For an ADHD student, the gain is different. When your attention drops out for five minutes in the middle of the lecture, it no longer matters. The recording keeps going, the text will be there. You can even jump back to the exact passage you missed by searching for a keyword. You no longer have to stay focused a hundred percent of the time to avoid getting lost.

A simple thirty-minute routine in the evening

Here is how a typical day can go. You have three lectures, you record all three. You take no notes during class, or maybe three keywords in a small notebook to flag a point you want to revisit. You actually listen. You ask a question when something is unclear because your head is free.

In the evening, you open Cosmonote and spend thirty minutes on each lecture. Start with the summary, five minutes, you see the big sections. Open the full transcript for the passages that still feel fuzzy. Copy into your notes, in your own words, what you want to keep. If writing is still a barrier, you can dictate your own notes into the app and get a clean text back.

In the end, you get what other students got in the lecture hall, without spending ninety minutes wrestling with your pen. The workload is still there, but it has moved to a moment when you are calm, at home, in control of the pace.

Question the lecture instead of re-reading it

The real luxury comes at revision time. A transcribed lecture is a source you can query. You still do not understand a point? You ask the app, it goes back to the exact passage where the lecturer spoke about it. You want a list of active-recall questions to test yourself? You can generate them from your own lecture, not from a generic textbook.

For a dyslexic student, this is precious because it avoids long, painful re-reading every time you get stuck on a detail. For an ADHD student, it turns revision into short, dynamic back-and-forth with immediate feedback, which holds up far better than a two-hour re-read.

What changes after one term

What really shifts is not the volume of content you retain, it is your posture in the room. You go from being the person chasing their own notes to being the person following the class and asking questions. You stop finishing every day with the feeling of having missed everything. You get your energy back for the part that should be the actual work of a student: understanding and remembering.

If you do not yet have an official accommodation, talk to your disability services office. Recording is almost always granted for a dyslexic or ADHD profile, usually with a short medical note and a meeting. Once that is in place, try Cosmonote on one lecture this week, then on a full week. You will know quickly whether your way of studying changes, and for most students in that situation, it changes deeply.