Without clear structures we struggle just to recall much more than unrelated scraps of information. As a result students do less well in exams than they could have expected, all because they havent learnt the skills involved in organising and structuring their understanding.
They sit down to revision with a near hopeless task facing them mounds of notes, without a structure in sight, beyond the loose list of points. This could be described as the parable of two mental filing systems. One student uses a large brown box, into which she throws all her scraps of paper without any systematic order. Then, when shes confronted with a question in the exam, she plunges her hand deep into the box in the despairing hope that she might find something useful. Sadly, all that shes likely to come up with is something thats, at best, trivial or marginally relevant, but which shes forced to make the most of, because its all shes got.
On the other hand there is the student who files all of her ideas systematically into a mental filing cabinet, knowing that, when shes presented with a question, she can retrieve from her mind a structure of interlinked relevant arguments backed by quotations and evidence, from which she can develop her ideas confidently. And most of us are quite capable of doing this with considerable skill, if only we know how to.
Linear notes, perhaps, the most familiar and widely used note-taking strategy, because it adapts well to most needs. As weve already seen, at university the exams we prepare ourselves for are designed to assess more than just our comprehension, so notes in the form of a series of short descriptive paragraphs, and even the list, are of little real value. Exams at this level are concerned with a wider range of abilities, including our abilities to discuss, criticise and synthesise arguments and ideas from a variety of sources, to draw connections and contrasts, to evaluate and so on. To do all this requires a much more sophisticated and adaptable strategy that responds well to each new demand. It should promote our abilities, not stunt them by trapping us within a straitjacket.
Linear notes are particularly good at analytical tasks, recording the structure of arguments and passages. As you develop the structure, with each step or indentation you indicate a further breakdown of the argument into subsections. These in turn can be broken down into further subsections. In this way you can represent even the most complex argument in a structure thats quite easy to understand.
Equally important, with clearly defined keywords, highlighted in capital letters or in different colours, its easy to recall the clusters of ideas and information that these keywords trigger of. In most cases it looks something like the following:
A Heading
1. Sub-heading
(a)
(b)
(c)
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
e. g.
(d)
2. Sub-heading
(a)
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
97
(b)
(c)
B Heading
1. Sub-heading
(a)
(b)
(i)
(ii)
(c)
(i)
(ii)
e. g.
d)
2. Sub-heading
3. Sub-heading
(a)
(b)
(c)
Needless to say, if we are to make all these successfully, we will have to make sure we organise our work in the most effective way. In the final chapters of this stage we will look at how to reorganise our retrieval system to tap into our own ideas and to pick up material wherever and whenever it appears. We will also examine the way we organize our time and the problems that can arise if we fail to do it effectively. Indeed, if we ignore either of these, we make it difficult for ourselves to get the most out of our abilities and to process our ideas well. Even though most of us routinely ignore it, organisation is the one aspect of our pattern of study that can produce almost immediate improvements in our work.
Here are a number of things you can do to make sure your structure works:
Keywords choose sharp, memorable words to key off the points in your structure. In the notes on the Rise of Nazism the three main points are not difficult to remember, particularly with keywords, like Humiliation, Ruins and the alliteration of Weakness of Weimar. But you need other words to key off the subsections, although you dont need them for every step and every subsection in the notes.
Keying off the main points and the principal subsections will trigger off the rest. Dont doubt yourself on this, it will try it. So just choose sharp, memorable words for the principal subsections, words like Treaty of Versailles, Allies, Weaken Germany, Revenge, Reparations, Economic slump, Middle class, Discontented and so on. They dont have to be snappy and bright, just memorable.
Capitalisation having chosen your keywords they must stand out, so you can see at a glance the structure of your notes. Its no good having a structure if it cant be seen beneath the undergrowth of words. Some people choose to put all their keywords into capitals.
Colour if you dont think this is sufficiently prominent, put your keywords in different colours. This doesnt have to be too fussy youre not creating a piece of modern art but its not too much of a bureaucratic task to get into the habit of working with two pens of different colours, one for picking out the keywords and the other for the rest. You will be surprised just how well this works. Its not unusual to come across people who can still visualise accurately in their minds eye pages of notes they took when they were studying for their school-leaving exams many years ago.
Gaps if the structure is to stand out, your notes must not appear too crowded. To avoid this, leave plenty of gaps between your points. This also gives you the opportunity to add other related things as you come across them in your reading, although you need to do this in such a way as to avoid overcrowding.
Abbreviations most of us use these, indeed we all tend to create our own personalised abbreviations for those words we seem to use most often. Even so, its still surprising how many students look with openmouthed astonishment when you list the standard abbreviations, like the following:
Therefore _
Because _
Leads to A
Increase/decrease O
Greater than/smaller then ><
Would/should wld/shld
Would be, should be w/be, sh/be
Equivalent =
Not π
Parallel llel
Nevertheless, as your tutors have no doubt told you, although these abbreviations are indispensable in compiling clear, concise notes, they shouldnt find their way into the final draft of your essay.
If youve left sufficient time between reading the text the first time for comprehension, and then reading it for structure, youre more likely to have a clear, uncluttered set of notes free from all unnecessary material.
Youll certainly be free of that most time-consuming of activities, taking notes on notes, which many of us are forced to do because our notes are not concise enough in the first place.
Unfortunately, there are many students, even at university, who convince themselves that this is a valuable thing to do; that its a way of learning their notes if they rewrite them more concisely. They seem to believe that by committing their notes to paper, theyre committing them to their minds, whereas, in fact, theyre doing anything but that.