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Making notes from reading
One of the most important skills you can acquire as a student is to resist the temptation to read every word of every text. Otherwise reading lists will drive you to despair. You will need to learn to discriminate quickly between helpful and unhelpful sources.
Surveying
This is where you get an overview of what a specific text can offer and whether some or all of it is it is relevant for your current purposes - that is why it's so important to do some thinking and planning before you start your research. Use the contents page, the introduction and the index to get a sense of the overall scope and approach and how the book is organised. If it's an article, the introductory and closing paragraphs, along with any sub-headings, should fulfil the same functions. (Illustrations may also give you some clues, but the choice and quality may have been dictated by economics rather than the intellectual content of the text.) This stage should only take a few minutes.
Skim reading
Like surveying, but with a sharper focus, once you have decided the text is worth further attention. If you are looking for something specific, use the index or chapter headings to help you narrow down your search, and resist the temptation to get side-tracked, however interesting other passages may seem.
More frequently, you will be skimming to get a general sense of the contents. Your initial survey should have told you how these are organised. Now you need to move down to the level of chapters and subsections. For each section, read quickly to grasp the outline. Try to summarise this in your own words.
See how the sequence of paragraphs relates to the development of the narrative or the argument. Each paragraph should have one main theme, usually signalled in the first sentence and then developed or illustrated in some way. The final sentence of each paragraph may also offer clues. Train your eyes to keep moving forward and down the page rather than stopping at every word, using signposts or topic sentences to help you identify the theme of each paragraph. At first, this seems impossible, but it does improve and it will make a difference.
Reading for the underlying structure (rather than the detail) in this way will also help to develop the organisation of your own writing.
Close reading
By the time you've identified the overall structure, you will know what sections (if any) you wish to focus on in more detail. Your close reading should still be active and critical, and informed by what you want to know. How convincing is the argument, what evidence is being used in support of what is being said?
SQ3R
This is shorthand for a routine (similar to the stages described above) that some people use when they need to absorb and remember the bulk of a text. It stands for:
SURVEY - check for relevance and general outline
QUESTION- what do you want to know, what do you think of it so far?
READ - a chapter or section at a time - general outline first, then the detail
RECALL - after each section, summarise - write outline notes from memory
REVIEW- look back over the section; check whether your recall was accurate; note any points you missed or misunderstood the first time around.
Layout of notes
A wide margin will also help you to keep your own comments on what you are reading separate from the summary. Alternatively, sub-divide each page of your notes into a section for factual information (dates, events etc), with another for notes about the author's ideas and interpretations.
Experiment with different techniques for different purposes.
The main thing to remember is to process the ideas and information as you go along so that your notes will be short enough to be readable and useful when you come back to them.
