5 Making notes
5.2 Ways of making notes
When you want to get seriously to grips with the ideas in a text and ‘make them your own’, there is really no alternative to written notes. For one thing, you don’t want to be always hunting for books and articles you once read to see what you underlined. You need a more handy version of material that is important.
Moreover, making notes forces you to ‘grapple’ with the ideas in the text as you read (even more so than when you underline), because you have to decide what to write down and how to put it. Whether or not your notes are particularly good, the mere activity of writing them down pushes you further into the meaning of the text.
But what kind of notes should you make and how many? What did your notes on Collee’s article look like? They could have been very brief, or spread out over several pages. They could have been written as sentences, or set out as a diagram. There are many different ways of making notes. What works for you will depend on:
X the way your mind works X the kind of text it is
X what you want to use the notes for
X the time you think is reasonable to ‘invest’.
Key Point
Notes should not be simply a shorthand copy of the original text. They should be an attempt to pick out the ‘bones’ of the text – particularly those points in the text that are relevant to your studies.
You might decide that all you need for an article like Collee’s is a couple of lines.
Food Poisoning: Collee G. – 1989
discusses bacteria in food/water causing infections or intoxications
This would remind you what the article is about, in case you wanted to go back to it and look something up. However, on their own, these lines will not bring back much of the content. If you need a bit more detail, you could skim back through the article and jot down some of the words you underlined. Figure 2.4 shows what I came up with.
A
ctivity Break Carefully compare Figure 2.4 (overleaf) with your own notes. What are the main differences? Do your notes include moreinformation than mine, or less? Does it matter? Are your notes clearer to you than mine are? Are they laid out differently? What are the advantages of your layout and of mine?
Looking just at Figure 2.4, could you understand all my abbreviations? Why did I use ‘bullets’? Why did I start some lines a little way in from the margin? Why do you think I used arrows in some places?
Figure 2.4 A sample of notes on the article by Gerald Collee
I hope you could see that ‘F. P.’ is short for ‘food poisoning’, ‘micro-orgs’ short for ‘micro-organisms’, and so on. Although the notes in Figure 2.4 are much shorter than Collee’s article, they probably capture all the information you need for most purposes. They also make the structure of the article clear. I used a bullet for each new topic, and then set all the sub-points within that topic a little way in from the margin, so that I could see what information belongs together. I used the arrows to show that something leads to something else. So, a virulent virus leads to food poisoning, and Salmonella typhi leads to typhoid.
You can invent any kind of symbols and abbreviations you like, so long as you will be able to remember what they mean when you come back to them. It is important to approach note-making creatively, and to lay out the notes in a way that suits the way you think.
Some people think visually, and so prefer to set their notes out as a diagram showing the main themes and their relationships to each other. I decided to try putting most of the content of the Collee article into a single ‘spray diagram’
(see Figure 2.5). (Various terms are used to describe diagrams of this sort –
‘spider diagrams’, ‘mind maps’ and so on – but the principles are similar.) You shouldn’t normally spend your time on something as ambitious as this. I just thought it would be useful to show you just how much can be achieved with one of these diagrams. You write the topic in the middle of the page with a circle around it. You then draw a line leading out to each of the major subtopics, and lines from the subtopics to the sub-subtopics, and so on.
• we cope w. routine contact w. bacteria all time – natural defences
– virulent virus /or huge numbers /or vulnerable humans→ F. P.
• intoxications – most serious – botulism – Clostridium botulinum – v.v. toxic – v. common – Staph. aureus – in warm processed foods
• infections – cholera – in water
– C. perfringens – v. common – spores can survive cooking – salmonella – S. typhi → typhoid
– S. enteritidis→ eggs→ sickness – or – poison food directly (intoxications) – either – infect us –then poison us (infections)
• not necessarily poison in food – actual cause – micro-orgs
• F. P. hits us all – sickness, vomiting – often don’t know source Food Poisoning Collee G. – 1989, New Scientist
Figure 2.5A‘spray diagram’ representing theentireColleearticle
butusuallycan’tbe identified for certain
because no food remains
either or warmth waterfood heat food above 63° keep equipmentdry
stomach acid immune system veryvirulent micro-organisms very large numbers of micro-organisms weakeneddefence systems the old young babiespregnant womenthe most serious only grows in absence of oxygenClostridium botulinum botulinal toxin most potent toxin: 1 gm kills 10m people
affects nerves, paralyses muscles death if reaches heart etc.
already in human body when it grows in food,can produce toxin acute vomiting, dizziness, diarrhoea multiplies in water enters gut, releases toxin reverses water flow in cells of gut lining death from loss of fluids and salts verycommon in nature some spores can survive cooking may germinate in canteen food kept warm,then multiply bacteria form spores in gutand produce toxin cramping pains anddiarrhoea
food poison strains infect many species 27,000cases of salmonella infection in 1988; of 505 cases where source was identified, 60 linkedto eggs
Salmonella typhi contaminates water typhoid fever
FoodPoisoning GeraldCollee,NewScientist, 21 October 1989
infections intoxications – saltedandcooked meats – milk foods – processed foods when keptwarm
– poultry/eggs – cattle, sheep, pigs – rats, mice
extremely rapid growth in numbersinfectus,then poison us poison food
micro-organisms are primarycause favourable conditionsbody’s defences ‘food poisoning’ symptoms occur when micro-organisms begin to overwhelm the body’s defenceswe routinelycope with low-level contamination Clostridium perfringens salmonellaecholerainfections Staphylococcus aureus
intoxications botulism
prevention
hits us all occasionally not necessarily ‘poison’ in food C
A
ctivity Break Take some time to have a close look at Figure 2.5. Move from the middle to the top left, and then work your way clockwise around the diagram. Does it help you to get a clearer idea of the contents of the Collee article? What, in particular, does it make clearer? Has anything important been left out?Note how I have placed the points in clusters, used connecting lines to bring out the links in the argument, and included arrows to indicate direct causes.
For example, you can pick any of the bacteria mentioned in the article and follow the chain of links to see what its effects are.
Does this kind of diagram work for you? Look back at your answer to Questions 4 and 6 in the Activity Break on page 25, and at my answers to the same questions on pages 25 and 26. See how much has been gained by making some notes.
Health Warning: READING IN DEPTH AND MAKING DETAILED NOTES CAN DAMAGE YOUR MORALE.
The notes in Figures 2.5 are not an example of what you should try to produce from an article like Collee’s. It would be crazy to invest so much time.
The point of showing you these full notes is to demonstrate the principles of setting out ideas in a structured way – and to show that you can represent most of the information in a text without having to reproduce the original sentences.
It’s quite striking that more than 2000 words, originally spread over several pages, can be captured fairly comprehensively in a single diagram. What is more, the diagram shows that Collee’s article is a lot more tightly and consistently structured than is apparent when you read it as a string of words.
Beneath the sentences and paragraphs lies a ‘skeleton’ of ideas.
Getting to the ‘bones’ of an argument
As I noted earlier, any text has just a few central ideas running through it.
However, you wouldn’t be able to understand these ideas properly, nor see their importance, if the writer simply stated them baldly in the fewest possible words. So, the writer puts ‘flesh on the bare bones’, giving examples and evidence – he or she ‘talks you through’ the argument, to show you how the ideas ‘work’.
Once you have understood, you don’t need the ‘flesh’ any more – you can just hold the ‘bones’ in your mind. Making notes is one way of picking out the bones. You should finish up with your own version of the author’s key ideas, set out in a way that makes sense to you.
A simple diagram requires an extra investment of time, but it can help to clarify your thoughts. For example, when you can see the ‘bare bones’ of a piece, you will probably find it much easier to use the contents in an
assignment. And, now we have done all this work on making notes, you must surely have a much better grasp of the Collee article, as well as a much better likelihood of remembering it. You should play around with various note-making methods for yourself, to find out when the gain in understanding and remembering is worth the cost in time and effort.
I’m sure that your own notes on the Collee article were quite different from any of my versions. You don’t need a detailed grasp of food poisoning right now, so it wouldn’t have been worth your while to invest a lot of time in close reading and elaborate note-making. At times, though, you will need a detailed understanding, so it is worth experimenting with different note-making styles for use on different occasions.
What are note-making skills?
Note-making is not a single ‘skill’, something you acquire once, for all times and occasions. It is a range of different activities, the common characteristic of which is that you are writing for yourself rather than an
‘audience’, so you don’t have to worry about ‘explaining’ yourself.
Making notes is more ‘strategy’ than ‘skill’. Being good at making notes involves reading texts in an active way – thinking ‘What is this about?’,
‘What do I want to remember?’, and then writing down the answers.
Note-making also requires flexibility – sometimes making detailed notes, sometimes very sketchy ones. You need to keep looking back at your notes and asking yourself ‘Are they doing the job I want them to?’ and ‘Could I be using my time more effectively?’ Think about your answers to these questions, and then adjust your approach accordingly.