Be proactive not reactive. You are shaping your essay – what information do you need to make your essay excellent? Be purposeful: ‘I am looking for something that will help me evaluate x’ is better than simply typing in either the essay title or the general topic area. Don’t wait to be ‘told the answer’ by the sources you find – interrogate them to discover information, ideas and perspectives that you can use in developing your scholarly essay.
Dynamic note-taking
When you think of note-taking, what image comes to mind. Are you in a lecture theatre copying PowerPoint slides from a screen? Are you huddled over a textbook copying out passages or is your pen – or finger – hovering, waiting for the best bit, the idea that will really make a difference? Note-taking is the Cinderella of academic study – amazingly potent, genuinely transformative, yet left behind, neglected in the shadows and all but forgotten.
Let’s change that now. Mundane, passive note-taking isn’t anything to get excited about and most of us have a device within arm’s reach right now that can produce a high-resolution photograph of anything we see and a reasonably clean audio recording of anything we hear. If we are passive recorders, then technology has probably superceded us already. But if we are simply writing in an unthinking way, when are we planning to start thinking? Do we do the thinking sometime later when we have to look through our notes to write our essay or revise for our exam? A much more exciting option is waiting, calling us to a different way of note-taking. We could see note-taking as an active, dynamic process, where we bring our ideas, uncertainties and questions to what we are reading and hearing. This dynamic interplay is great – it’s where learning happens.
Three aspects of this process will be focused on here. They are all concerned with note-taking as a dynamic process. Dynamic note-taking is a means of capturing how the ideas that you encounter (in lectures, textbooks or articles) relate to: each other; your assignments; and your ideas and questions.
Capturing how the ideas you encounter relate to each other
When you are reading a textbook on a particular topic or listening to a lecture, what are the ideas and how do they relate? This very obviously varies considerably, but think of it in terms of an essay that you are writing or an exam answer that you are preparing right now. As I start to answer this question myself, immediately I get a sense of a complex pattern. Some ideas form an obvious debate, and some a far more subtle relationship. Try using the questions below to guide your thinking.
Can you locate the key debate(s)?
Sometimes this is unmissable. If you are in a lecture on language acquisition, you are very likely to come across the fact that Skinner (1957) and Chomsky (1959) expressed divergent views. Locating the key debate is at its easiest when one article directly comments on another, as with Chomsky’s (1959) review of Skinner’s (1957) book, or Zimbardo’s (2006) response to Haslam and Reicher’s (2006) paper on their televised prison experiment. But it can be more subtle. This is the case when we come across ideas that are incompatible, but one does not specifically name and critique the other. In this case, we are looking at one perspective or idea and working out the implications it might have for our target idea, or focus. In doing this we are making the connection ourselves.
Which ideas support others?
It is important to think about how some ideas that we come across might share commonalities. This can be in the form of complete or partial agreement. We may find that one article provides further empirical evidence for another – for example, McArthur’s (1972) empirical studies provided empirical evidence for Kelley’s Covariation Model of Causal Attribution (Kelley, 1967). When we come across supporting evidence or concurring ideas, we may want to note what this might add to the argument and bring that out in our essay – for example, is there a different type of methodology which yields supporting results. Think about the argument almost as if you are building a legal case, interrogating the sources that you read: ‘Does this strengthen one side of the argument?’ If you identify something that does contribute to one or other side of the argument(s) in your essay, bring out the way in which it does so when writing your essay.
Which ideas expand on others?
Sometimes an idea expands or modifies another in a certain way. For example, Drury and Reicher’s Elaborated Social Identity Model (Drury & Reicher, 2000; Stott et al., 2018) very much built on Tajfel, Flament, Billig and Bundy’s Social Identity Theory (Tajfel et al., 1971; Tajfel, 1979). Identifying the nature of the difference, while recognising the common ground, is important in order to demonstrate a clear, sophisticated understanding of this more complex relationship between the perspectives that you are drawing on.
Which ideas reconceptualise the issue(s)?
This gets at more fundamental questioning and can often be used to take your initial notes and your finished essay to a higher level. A lot of critical psychology overtly does this by questioning the core assumptions and focus of psychology. Critical psychology challenges: for example, the individualising nature of psychology and its heteronormative and sex/gender binary assumptions. It challenges unthinking use of conventional definitions (of ‘aggression’ for example) and the neglect of the influence of ideology on what we study and how we study it.
Capturing how the ideas you encounter relate to your assignments
However intricately we grasp how the ideas we come across interrelate, we need to be really clear about what the essay title is asking us to do. If the essay title is asking me to ‘Outline and evaluate the excitation transfer model of aggression’, then critical material about the way in which aggression has been defined in general may not be directly relevant, or may form part of a concluding conceptualisation towards the end of the essay. By contrast, the title ‘Critically evaluate some of the key assumptions inherent in empirical research into aggression’ is pitched at an overarching conceptual level, thus material about how aggression has been implicitly and explicitly defined would be key.
There may be more subtle differences in terms of the scope within an essay. The following two titles both highlight Piaget, but the first indicates that attention should be paid to his entire stage theory, while the second points to a series of experiments that relate to the stage theory:
‘Outline and evaluate Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development.’
‘Critically evaluate Piaget’s interpretations of his conservation experiments.’
Think for a moment about the shape of the essay that these different titles suggest. You can probably imagine that a lot of similar material would be relevant – for example, reference to conservation is likely to feature in both. But think on for a moment longer. There are likely to be differences between an essay that gets into the various nuances and critiques of the conservation experiments and a more global contrast of Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development with, for example, information processing perspectives.
Really mastering this neat fit between the literature that we come across, the relationships between these sources and what we need to do in our essay is an art, but both the beginner on their first essay and the expert on their millionth word of psychology have to ask the very same question: ‘How does this relate to what I am trying to write?’ Even asking this question will help free you from the limiting tendency to simply trot out ‘the Piaget essay’ (as if there were a singular Piaget essay) whenever you see the name. Further guidance
