Last week I decided to change the way I took notes in the hope that I could make it easier to find what I was looking for when I come to right them up. I decided that a wide left margin would be a good starting point to record keywords, notes on notes etc. Then I came across a post on my favourite PhD Blog
Thesis Whisperer with the title -
Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method. The article describes a rather similar idea for taking notes with the added provision for including a critical summary. Which at some later stage you can probably lift right off the page into your thesis. There is also a
link part way down the page for a PDF template for the proposed page layout. You could of course just rule up a notebook yourself with the same layout. I had had the idea of looking for paper ruled in Landscape format to make for wider columns. Whilst it is available, it is not conveniently so. I think I am just about getting the hang of my new note taking method. As
Katherine Firth, the author, explains the method much better than I could, I make no apologies for reposting the article here:-
This post is by Dr Katherine Firth
who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a
particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine
is a Thesis Whisperer, like me. Unlike me, Katherine is still an active
researcher in her field of 20th-century poetry. Over coffee
Katherine told me about the ‘Cornell Method’ and kindly agreed to write a
post. I found it enlightening, I hope you do too.
I take a lot of
notes. Even when I was doing my PhD
and I was taking thousands of pages of notes, I took them by hand. I
tried using a computer, but there are so many things that are really
hard to do on screen (drawing an arrow to make a connection between
points, for example) that are really quick on paper. Also, you only
need one hand to write notes, but two hands to type. And that free hand
comes in useful for holding open books, grasping coffee cups, or
stuffing your face with Gummi bears.
Now that I’m working with lots of PhD students, I find that they also
take a lot of notes. Years and years of notes. Notes about field
work. Notes about interviews. Notes about lab results. Notes about
books they’ve read. And then they get stuck. Because they have to
turn the notes into a thesis. And that’s really hard.
