How to Write Better Essays

Practice exercise 8

Note-taking for analysis and structure

Take a chapter from one of the books you’re using for the essay you’re

working on in the assignments. Read it through, first, for comprehen-

sion. Then, a day or so later, read it again, this time for analysis and

structure. Leave it a few hours for your mind to self-organise. Then, take

a blank sheet of paper and try writing the broad structure of what you

can recall of the main points that interest you from the chapter.

Don’t be tempted to go back to the text, even if it’s just to check up

on an isolated fact. And give yourself up to an hour trying to recall the

structure. Normally you won’t need this amount of time, but for this exer-

cise give yourself plenty of time to do it thoroughly.

You will be pleasantly surprised by the complex structure of intercon-

nected points you’ve been able to produce unaided. You will never again

to be seduced into recording things that ‘might’ be useful in the future.

Inevitably, this results in masses of notes that obscure the main

structure, which, as we’ve seen, is the only means by which we can

recall them in the first place.

To avoid this we need to remind ourselves constantly of two things:

first, that almost certainly we have better memories than we think; and

secondly, that we’re not producing encyclopaedic accounts of the

subject, in which we record every known fact. To be of any use, notes

should be an accurate record of ourunderstanding, of ourthinking,

not someone else’s.

We can easily lose sight of this when we try to take notes while we’re

reading the text for the first time or straight after we’ve read it. We lose

our objectivity: all we can see is the author ’s ideas and opinions, not

our own. We need to give our minds time to digest the ideas and self-

organise. You will find that if you leave time between reading and

noting, your mind will have created its own structures out of the ideas

it has taken from the text.

Then, after we’ve allowed our minds sufficient time to do this, we

need to organise ourselves to tap into it, to get our own understand-

ing down on paper, without using the text. Otherwise the author

will hijack our thinking and we’ll simply copy from the text

without thought. Remember, you can always go back to check on

details afterwards.

104 Research

Continued

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