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Needless to say, if we are to make all these successfully, we will have to make sure we organise our work in the most effective way. In the final chapters of this stage we will look at how to reorganise our retrieval system to tap into our own ideas and to pick up material wherever and whenever it appears. We will also examine the way we organize our time and the problems that can arise if we fail to do it effectively. Indeed, if we ignore either of these, we make it difficult for ourselves to get the most out of our abilities and to process our ideas well. Even though most of us routinely ignore it, organisation is the one aspect of our pattern of study that can produce almost immediate improvements in our work.
Here are a number of things you can do to make sure your structure works:
Keywords – choose sharp, memorable words to key off the points in your structure. In the notes on the Rise of Nazism the three main points are not difficult to remember, particularly with keywords, like ‘Humiliation’, ‘Ruins’ and the alliteration of ‘Weakness of Weimar’. But you need other words to key off the subsections, although you don’t need them for every step and every subsection in the notes.
Keying off the main points and the principal subsections will trigger off the rest. Don’t doubt yourself on this, it will – try it. So just choose sharp, memorable words for the principal subsections, words like ‘Treaty of Versailles’, ‘Allies’, ‘Weaken Germany’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Reparations’, ‘Economic slump’, ‘Middle class’, ‘Discontented’ and so on. They don’t have to be snappy and bright, just memorable.
Capitalisation – having chosen your keywords they must stand out, so you can see at a glance the structure of your notes. It’s no good having a structure if it can’t be seen beneath the undergrowth of words. Some people choose to put all their keywords into capitals.
Colour – if you don’t think this is sufficiently prominent, put your keywords in different colours. This doesn’t have to be too fussy – you’re not creating a piece of modern art – but it’s not too much of a bureaucratic task to get into the habit of working with two pens of different colours, one for picking out the keywords and the other for the rest. You will be surprised just how well this works. It’s not unusual to come across people who can still visualise accurately in their mind’s eye pages of notes they took when they were studying for their school-leaving exams many years ago.
Gaps – if the structure is to stand out, your notes must not appear too crowded. To avoid this, leave plenty of gaps between your points. This also gives you the opportunity to add other related things as you come across them in your reading, although you need to do this in such a way as to avoid overcrowding.
Abbreviations – most of us use these, indeed we all tend to create our own personalised abbreviations for those words we seem to use most often. Even so, it’s still surprising how many students look with openmouthed astonishment when you list the standard abbreviations, like the following:
Therefore _
Because _
Leads to A
Increase/decrease ≠ O
Greater than/smaller then ><
Would/should wld/shld
Would be, should be w/be, sh/be
Equivalent =
Not π
Parallel llel
Nevertheless, as your tutors have no doubt told you, although these abbreviations are indispensable in compiling clear, concise notes, they shouldn’t find their way into the final draft of your essay.
If you’ve left sufficient time between reading the text the first time for comprehension, and then reading it for structure, you’re more likely to have a clear, uncluttered set of notes free from all unnecessary material.
You’ll certainly be free of that most time-consuming of activities, taking notes on notes, which many of us are forced to do because our notes are not concise enough in the first place.
Unfortunately, there are many students, even at university, who convince themselves that this is a valuable thing to do; that it’s a way of learning their notes if they rewrite them more concisely. They seem to believe that by committing their notes to paper, they’re committing them to their minds, whereas, in fact, they’re doing anything but that.
Taking notes can be a pleasant substitute for thinking. It’s something we can do on auto-pilot. In fact it can be one of the most relaxing parts of our pattern of study. While we are placing few demands on our mind, it can go off to consider more pleasant things, like the plans for the weekend, or reminiscences about last year’s holiday.
This underlines the main problem in note-taking: most of us find it difficult to be brief. While we have our minds on auto-pilot we’re able to convince ourselves that almost every point, however insignificant, is vitally important to our future understanding. Not surprisingly then, we end up omitting very little, obscuring the structure so that when we come to revision we have to start taking notes on our own notes.
But there’s another reason that’s more difficult to tackle. Most of us, at times, doubt our ability to remember details, so we allow ourselves to be seduced into recording things that ‘might’ be useful in the future.
Inevitably, this results in masses of notes that obscure the main structure, which, as we’ve seen, is the only means by which we can recall them in the first place.
To avoid this we need to remind ourselves constantly of two things: first, that almost certainly we have better memories than we think; and secondly, that we’re not producing encyclopaedic accounts of the subject, in which we record every known fact. To be of any use, notes should be an
