Reading is to the mind
what exercise is to the body
Richard Steele, English 1672–1729
Look up Notational velocity when I get home for my Mac.
Technique #1
First: read a section of your textbook chapter
- Read just enough to keep an understanding of the material.
Do not take notes, but rather focus on understanding the material.
It is tempting to take notes as you are reading the first time, but this is not an efficient technique: you are likely to take down too much information and simply copy without understanding
Second: Review the material
- Locate the main ideas, as well as important sub-points
- Set the book aside
- Paraphrase this information:
Putting the textbook information in your own words forces you to become actively involved with the material
Third: write the paraphrased ideas as your notes
- Do not copy information directly from the textbook
- Add only enough detail to understand
Technique #2
- 1. In preparation for writing a piece of work, your notes might come from a number of different sources: course materials, set texts, secondary reading, interviews, or tutorials and lectures. You might gather information from radio or television broadcasts, or from experiments and research projects. The notes could also include your own ideas, generated as part of the essay planning process.2. The notes you gather in preparation for writing will normally provide detailed evidence to back up any arguments you wish to make. They might also be used as illustrative material. They might include such things as the quotations and page references you plan to use in an essay. Your ultimate objective in planning will be to produce a one or two page outline of the topics you intend to cover.
- 3. Be prepared for the fact that you might take many more notes than you will ever use. This is perfectly normal. At the note-taking stage you might not be sure exactly what evidence you will need. In addition, the information-gathering stage should also be one of digesting and refining your ideas. 4. Don’t feel disappointed if you only use a quarter or even a tenth of your materials. The proportion you finally use might vary from one subject to another, as well as depending on your own particular writing strategy. Just because some material is not used, don’t imagine that your efforts have been wasted.
5. When taking notes from any source, keep in mind that you are attempting to make a compressed and accurate record of information, other people’s opinions, and possibly your own observations on the subject in question. 6. Your objective whilst taking the notes is to distinguish the more important from the less important points being made. Record the main issues, not the details. You might write down a few words of the original if you think they may be used in a quotation. Keep these extracts as short as possible unless you will be discussing a longer passage in some detail.7. Don’t try to write down every word of a lecture – or copy out long extracts from books. One of the important features of note-taking is that you are making a digest of the originals, and translating the information into your own words.
8. Some people take so many notes that they don’t know which to use when it’s time to do the writing. They feel that they are drowning in a sea of information.
9. This problem is usually caused by two common weaknesses in note-taking technique:
10. There are two possible solution to this problem:
11. Even though the notes you take are only for your own use, they will be more effective if they are recorded clearly and neatly. Good layout of the notes will help you to recall and assess the material more readily. If in doubt use the following general guidelines. 12. What follows is an example of notes taken whilst listening to an Open University radio broadcast – a half hour lecture by the philosopher and cultural historian, Isaiah Berlin. It was entitled ‘Tolstoy’s Views on Art and Morality‘, which was part of the third level course in literary studies A 312 – The Nineteenth Century Novel and its Legacy.Isaiah Berlin – ‘Tolstoy on Art and Morality’ 3 Sep 89 1. T’s views on A extreme – but he asks important questns which disturb society
2. 1840s Univ of Kazan debate on purpose of A
3. Met simple & spontaneous people & soldiers in Caucasus
4. Westernizers Vs Slavophiles – T agreed with Ws
5. 2 views of A in mid 19C – A for art’s sake/ A for society’s sake6. Pierre (W&P) and Levin (AK) as egs of ’searchers for truth’
7. Natural life (even drunken violence) better than intellectual
8. T’s contradiction – to be artist or moralist
9. T’s 4 criteria for work of art
10. T crit of other writers
11. What is Art? Emotion recollected and transmitted to others
12. But his own tastes were for high art
13. Tried to distinguish between his own art and moral tracts14. ‘Artist cannot help burning like a flame’
15. Couldn’t reconcile contradictions in his own beliefs
Edison did it, may be I can?
Edison’s system was developed to support his life work and was very successful in doing so. The main elements of his system are as follows:
- Any useful or important development was recorded so that no effort was wasted in repeating experiments or efforts unnecessarily. Edison’s method was once described as an “empirical dragnet” by Nikola Tesla, another famous inventor who worked for Edison for some time. Combining Edison’s hard working and hard thinking methods with an effective record creation and retention system was a very important aspect of his work.
- Forward-looking. Edison’s notes included the forward-looking things we tend to incorporate in many of our modern personal planners. Things like lists of contacts, appointments, “to do” lists, and actionable items for follow up or later review were all contained within his comprehensive system.
- Rearward-looking. The ability to go back and check his written record was useful in several ways. He was able to use his records in various lawsuits filed against him and by him against others as evidence and to substantiate his claims. His competitors were often unable to compete with his records so he often came out victorious in these legal battles. He was always able to review past work and avoid repeatedly going down dead-end roads. He could always review whatever he had said or was told. He never had to remember most things as long as he could remember how to look it up later.
- The record system was searchable. Sometimes, from among millions of pages, there would be a key document that would prove invaluable. Unfortunately, with his manual system, he often spent considerable time searching through these records looking for the key item. He did however have a fairly good system of archiving his records by a combination of chronological and subject matter based systems. He created numerous groupings, files, folders, etc. which helped him to get to the right part of his records in a reasonably short time.
- Who, what, where, when and how much. These details could be fairly easily retrieved from Edison’s system in relation to any aspect of whatever he was involved with. These included financial records and they formed an important part of his note-taking system. He kept all his incoming as well as copies of all his outgoing correspondence. This was not necessarily easy to do before the invention of the modern office copier.
- How and why. Edison’s research laboratory work was a focal point for much of his record system. Patent applications and reviews were based in large part on his notes that needed to include the how and why aspects in sufficient detail so that the patents themselves would be complete and able to withstand any legal challenges. Edison often used his records to defend his position from competitors in his day when patents and technologies were becoming very fashionable and important as they remain today. His system of experimentation and related record keeping has become the basis of the modern industrial research institution – which he is widely credited with having invented.
- Extremely powerful memory aid. Edison had an amazing memory. He was well informed on a wide range of topics and always seemed to be able to recall what he told someone or what he was told. Much of this is due to his system of notes. By writing everything down that he thought was worth writing, he was able to free himself of the burden of having to remember it. A strange and almost unexpected thing occurs. The process of writing things down aids in the mental memory retention. The combination of having the confidence in knowing the information is on record and easily retrievable combined with the improved retention from the process of writing it down, creates a winning combination when it comes to memory.
Technique #4 taken from http://ask.metafilter.com/31113/How-do-I-take-notes-on-big-books
1. In part, I credit the speed with which I finished my dissertation (in English) to limiting the number of books I used–I rarely had more than, say, four or five books out from the library at once. Fewer books to consider simultaneously mean that more material from those books will stick in long-term memory, which cuts out time wasted looking up things over and over again in books you don’t really remember because you read them too quickly the first time. In this case you may find that you don’t need a notetaking “system”–I certainly didn’t have much of one. I just remembered where important bits of text were when I needed them. (But in my case the research and writing phases of my dissertation were simultaneous. I’m not sure that, in English, there’s much need for a dissertation “research phase.”)
2. During my usual reading process I just use index cards for bookmarks–when I’m done with the book, the index card (or cards, on very rare occasions) stay in the back of the book and the book goes on the shelf. Try to limit the notes you make to a single index card–that way you’ll stick to the most important points. Not everything that you think is important at the moment you read it is actually important, or even meaningful–this is doubly the case for much academic prose.
Slow and steady wins the race with dissertation writing; quality of reading trumps quantity of books read.
One more thing: the idea of an English dissertation that uses both neuroscience and theology texts as secondary sources is oh so tasty, but perhaps a bit expansive. If you are reading specifically to narrow your dissertation topic, then you are better off not taking any notes at all right now, I think. Just read to see where your mind takes you. There’s no hurry. If an idea’s worth including in your dissertation, you’ll be sure to see it again somewhere else.
That site listed contains lots of useful advice which I will go back to.
