Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 75

This sounds obvious, but it isn’t – especially as most of us have never been taught how to take notes from source materials. If we do receive such tuition, it is most likely hurried, obvious and focuses on the practical ephemera (have your laptop ready and organise your digital files) as much as on the intellectual substance of note-taking. But there is an intellectual challenge in note-taking that is easily underestimated – if we don’t recognise that, we could be in trouble. If you give note-taking the respect it deserves – seeing it as a challenging and creative part of writing your essay – you will be able to do it much more effectively and this will enhance your essays.

Think of all the online and hard-copy sources of information that you have found to be relevant for the essay you are thinking about right now. Immediately, you may have some notes you took down in class; there may be lecture slides or printed notes; there’s probably at least one textbook, and most likely some additional references. If you have read all of these, they won’t form your essay, but they certainly can inform it. Sources, however good they are, will not ‘tell us what to write’, but they will contain arguments and details that we can weave into our own argumentative essay. You are the Hercule Poirot or the Sherlock Holmes of your essay, marshalling the evidence and weighing up the different interpretations. Don’t become less than that. You are the person who can demonstrate in this very essay your own intelligent engagement with the complex and contradictory ideas and evidence in front of you.

You may feel that it is all very well being told that you should make it your own and be given a sense of how creative and heroic that can be, but how on earth is it done? Use the examples below to help you get a vivid sense of what it looks like when sources are used poorly and effectively. From this you can build an understanding about how you can really have a sense of sources as resources, which are there for you to use in constructing your essay. To do this means that we are being intelligently proactive, coming to the sources with a sense of what we are looking for. We are not so rigid that we fail to learn anything, but nor are we so passive that we are waiting for what we read to dictate what we write.