Note Taking Methods

A note taking strategy offered in the book is to write down particularly memorable quotes. I think this is a good strategy because it helps to summarize the passage or piece of information by using actual extracts from the piece. This is useful for making a paper sound more credible because it makes reference to the actual paper instead of being a simple summary of the text. I was always taught that quotes are better than summarizations in school. When I am taking notes in school I often times do not write down quotes; however, if I am writing a paper and using parenthetical citations, I will often times extract useful quotes from documents to use them in my paragraphs.

            Another note taking strategy is to find background information about a certain topic to learn more about it. This would definitely be useful because it gives more information about what the paper is about and how it relates to other things instead of just the narrow view of what the paper is about. I think this can help a lot in writing a paper because it helps you see the point of the paper instead of just writing simply to write. Knowing the background of the topic can help plan out a paper and come up with a structure instead of just doing a free form write just to fill the designated word count.

            Another note strategy in the book is to write a passage that gives the context about the argument. This could be helpful to learning more about the background but I don’t really see much of a point for writing an extra paragraph for a paper. I think that the above two strategies would be more helpful than writing an extra paragraph or two about the background information.