Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 67

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 If we are passive recorders, then technology has probably superceded us already.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.