Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 81

One of the key reasons that we might struggle to make a passage our own is that we are trying to: (a) reduce time, and/or (b) reduce thinking. If you are short of time, don’t start swapping words left and right, turn to Chapters 10 and 12 for clarity about what you should focus on. Alternatively, if you want to reduce your thinking because you do not have confidence in your ideas, stay with this chapter (and the ones that follow); we can really build your well-placed academic confidence together.

To really make the passage your own you will need to do something that might seem crazy, off-putting, pointless – you need to break it from the coherent whole into the constituent ideas so that you can assemble it as your own whole. In this way, you have taken the raw material ideas referred to and made an argument with them – that is, you have used them to do a particular job in your essay. As mentioned above, the skill of note-taking is drastically undervalued, and almost never taught, so if it seems difficult or off-putting, that’s hardly surprising. To get started, practise identifying and separating the detail and the argument in the paragraph that you are looking at.