Read the information preferably out loud (or at least mutter it to yourself) to retain it better. After doing this, try and see some sort of structure or hierarchy to this information, and then either do vertical notes as I do, or you can try mind-mapping which many others do. The point of getting a hierarchy is that it helps in seeing the relationships between things. I find that with my notes, I only ever end up reading and memorising either the first or last 'tier' of dot points as I can pretty much infer the rest of the information just from those, depending on what kind of information it is. Generally what I do is that if the details are complicated, read the last tier; if they aren't read the first.
EDIT: Note that this is just a general approach. I'm not sure what your eng lang texts demand of you, but I assume it can still be applied. However I know there are cases where the hierarchy thing doesn't really work, and you really do just have to rote learn a whole list of details.