How to Take Fichamento-Style Lecture Notes Without Missing the Lecture: Guide and Templates

The professor has just said the sentence that closes the argument of your paper — and you are sitting there with an aching hand, trying to copy words that have already slipped into the past. Anyone who has tried to do fichamento — the structured academic note-card system used in Brazilian universities — live during a lecture knows the trap: either you write and stop following the reasoning, or you follow the reasoning and get home with no record at all.

This guide shows how to build quotation, summary, and bibliographic fichas (note cards) from your lectures — with a workflow that separates the lecture from the note-taking, so you never again have to choose between the two.

What fichamento is (and why the lecture is the most wasted source)

Fichamento is the organized record of a piece of content: the source reference, the main ideas, quotations with their location, and a comment of your own. The three classic types are:

The detail almost no one mentions: a lecture is a legitimate academic source. When the content comes from a professor speaking (not from a published text), Brazil’s standards association ABNT requires, under NBR 10520, that it be treated as verbal information — informação verbal in the original, the equivalent of a personal communication in English-language citation styles. The quotation receives the marker (personal communication), and the available details (who said it, where, and when) go into the text or into a note. It does not go into the reference list, because there was no formal publication.

This changes everything: the professor’s spoken words can become a formal citation in your theoretical framework, with the transcript serving as proof of what was said.

The problem with taking fichas during a live lecture

• Speed. No one transcribes human speech in real time. If you try, the ficha becomes a draft full of holes — half-started sentences and gaps.
• Divided attention. Writing and understanding compete for the same cognitive resource. The passage you manage to write down is usually the one you failed to understand.
• Selective loss. In a rush, you copy whatever is easy to copy — and you leave out exactly the dense conceptual passage that made the ficha worth writing.
• Broken pattern. Every lecture comes out in a different format. Fichas without a standard cannot be combined later; they become a pile, not a consultation database.

The workflow: build fichas from the transcript, not from memory

The solution is to separate the lecture from the note-taking into two moments:

1. During the lecture, you record the audio on your phone — every smartphone has a built-in voice recorder — and participate without interruptions.
2. Afterward, you generate the lecture transcript and build the fichas from the text, calmly, hunting for the exact passages.

It is the same principle as photography: the raw capture happens once; the framing you decide later. From the transcript, you can produce all three types of ficha without listening to the lecture again.

How this works with Sintesy

In the Sintesy dashboard, you send the lecture audio through “Send file” (the upload accepts the common phone recording formats, such as MP3 and M4A — record at normal quality, no extra microphone required). In seconds, the AI returns:

• A complete transcript of the lecture — the raw material for the quotation ficha
• A structured summary with the main topics — the base of the summary ficha
• A mind map of the connections between concepts — useful for visualizing the lecture before you build your fichas
• A checklist of the points the professor cited — a draft of what deserves a ficha

The free plan processes 60 minutes of audio per day and generates up to 10 syntheses per day — more than enough room for one lecture a day. At the end, you export the material as PDF or DOCX (available on the Pro plan) and attach the fichas wherever you want.

Step by step: from the recording to the finished ficha

1. Record the entire lecture

Place your phone close to you or close to the room’s speaker. No equipment needed: transcription quality depends more on clean audio (no noise drowning out the voice) than on an expensive microphone.

2. Generate the transcript

Upload the file to Sintesy. Practical tip: in the context field, write the course and the topic (e.g., “Constitutional Law lecture — judicial review”). The AI uses that context to get the technical terms right.

3. Build the quotation ficha

Open the transcript and locate the passages you would quote verbatim. Because the source is the professor’s spoken words, the ficha takes the personal communication format (ABNT’s informação verbal):

QUOTATION FICHA — Lecture Source: [course] lecture, delivered by [professor’s name], [institution], [date]. Excerpt: “Diffuse review arises from the Judiciary’s own actions, with no specific proceeding established for it.” (personal communication) Comment: Connect with the Marbury v. Madison example mentioned right after.

The NBR 10520 rule for verbatim quotation is to transcribe faithfully — and here the AI transcript eliminates the biggest risk of note-taking from speech: quoting from memory what the professor “more or less” said. In the body of your paper, the marker stays in the running text: ... (personal communication), with who spoke, where, and when given in the paragraph or in a note.

4. Build the summary ficha

Without looking at the transcript word for word, write the central ideas of the lecture in your own words — the structured summary Sintesy generates serves as a scaffold, but the final wording is yours, because that is where the content sticks. Each main idea becomes a block of the ficha, in the order in which the lecture presented them.

5. Build the bibliographic ficha

Bring together in a single ficha: the lecture reference (as a personal communication or, if the professor recommended a bibliography, the book reference in the NBR 6023 standard), the summary in 4–6 lines, the 2–3 key quotations, and a final comment on why that lecture matters to your research. This is the ficha you consult months later, when your final-year thesis calls for the theoretical framework.

Templates to copy

Template 1 — Quotation ficha (personal communication)

QUOTATION FICHA
Source: [course] lecture, [professor], [institution], [date].
Excerpt: "[verbatim transcript of the passage]" (personal communication)
Context: [where in the lecture / argument the passage fits]
Comment: [how you plan to use it in your paper]

Template 2 — Summary ficha

SUMMARY FICHA
Source: [course] lecture, [professor], [date].
Central theme: [the lecture's subject in one sentence]
Main ideas:
1. [idea in your own words]
2. [idea in your own words]
3. [idea in your own words]
Key terms: [technical vocabulary that shows up on the exam]

Template 3 — Bibliographic ficha

BIBLIOGRAPHIC FICHA
Lecture reference: [course, professor, institution, date] (personal communication)
Recommended bibliography: [LAST NAME, First name. Title. City: Publisher, year.]
Summary: [4–6 lines with the central ideas]
Key quotations: ["excerpt" (personal communication)]
Comment: [the lecture's relevance to your research]

What the AI does — and what stays yours

The AI transcribes, summarizes, and structures, but two parts of fichamento have no shortcut:

• The choice of what goes on a ficha. Deciding which passage deserves a verbatim quotation is your academic judgment — the relevance criterion comes from your research.
• The summary in your own words. Automatic paraphrasing is not a summary ficha; the active processing that makes the content stick happens when you write it yourself.

Use the transcript as the faithful record of what was said (including to check, quotation by quotation, whether the transcription got the technical term right) and the structured summary as a starting point — but the final ficha passes through your hands.

Conclusion

Fichamento of a lecture stops being a writing race the moment you stop building fichas live. Record the lecture, transcribe it with Sintesy, and build the fichas from the text — a quotation ficha for the words you will use in your paper, a summary ficha to make the content stick, and a bibliographic ficha to map the entire course. The lecture happens once; a well-made ficha you will consult for the rest of your degree.