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Taking Smart Notes

Where do you fight writer’s block? On the front lines of your research through effective note-taking. But not all notes are created equal, and not all reading is done the same way.

Start by recognizing that reading itself is a multi-stage process:

  • In Inspectional Reading, you skim the material to decide if it’s worth a deeper dive. This is your first pass, helping you prioritize your research efforts.
  • In Analytical Reading, you engage critically with the text, dissecting arguments and evaluating evidence. This is where deep understanding begins to form.
  • In Synoptical Reading, you compare multiple texts on the same topic, synthesizing information across sources. This advanced stage allows you to create connections and generate new insights.

Just as reading consists of different stages, effective note-taking involves three distinct types of notes. Per Sönke Ahrens’s helpful book How to Take Smart Notes, here are three kinds of notes to keep distinct:

  1. Fleeting Notes are the quick, spontaneous thoughts that pop into your head as you read. For example: “Project-based learning increases engagement – check impact on test scores?”
  2. Literature Notes capture the main ideas or arguments of a text in your own words, along with the bibliographic data. For instance: “Johnson & Lee (2023) found that gamification increased student participation by 37% in online courses.”
  3. Permanent Notes are the crown jewels of your note-taking system: standalone ideas written in full sentences, as if you’re explaining the concept to someone else. These notes get the drafting stage started as soon as you’ve read something. For example: “The effectiveness of gamification in education raises important questions about long-term learning outcomes and the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.”

Each stage is a process of distillation, where you add clarity and depth to your understanding.

To truly harness the power of note-taking, consider these strategies:

  1. Always read with “a pen in hand” to capture those fleeting thoughts.
  2. Write concise, selective notes in your own words.
  3. Develop a workflow that transforms your fleeting and literature notes into well-formulated permanent notes.
  4. Use labels and tags to create connections between ideas.
  5. Regularly review your notes to uncover emerging research projects.

Adopting this system can revolutionize your research and writing process. It combats procrastination, increases flexibility, and eliminates the feeling of wasted effort. By externalizing your thoughts, you reduce cognitive load and free up mental space for new insights. Moreover, this approach enhances your ability to generate ideas and produce drafts for multiple projects.

As Sönke Ahrens wisely notes, “Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.” By integrating smart note-taking into your research routine, you’re not just collecting information. You’re taking notes that can transform into powerful tools for combating writer’s block and generate new ideas.

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From the Ground Up

Writing is like driving a stick-shift car. At first, it seems impossible to coordinate all the things you have to do at the same time. Each part of a writing task initially requires conscious thought, making it a challenge to juggle something coherent and complex.

With practice, however, these skills become second nature.

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A Slam-Dunk Argument

Every Rhetoric and Composition class worth its salt includes rhetorical analysis. Students learn to dissect arguments using the rhetorical triangle, a concept popularized by James Kinneavy in his 1980 book A Theory of Discourse.

This tool helps diagnose where an argument is strongest by examining three key elements: ethos (appeals to the writer’s trustworthiness), logos (appeals to reason), and pathos (appeals to emotions).

To demonstrate the contextual power of these appeals, let’s look at a recent hot topic: NBA media coverage. This example showcases how different networks leverage ethos in particular to connect with their audience.

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Writing With Purpose

Students struggle with knowing why they’re writing. Christian educators can give them a simple answer: you write to serve.

Academic writing should help readers understand better something they want to understand well. Writers should focus squarely on their readers – our peers, instructors, and ultimately God.

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Clustering

Clustering is a visually-oriented approach to prewriting.

Like freewriting and brainstorming, clustering allows your students to think on paper before they start writing.

In clustering, students put the assignment’s key topic in a circle at the center of the page. They then connect new thoughts to the initial topic with other circles and lines. What emerges is a network of ideas.

If I’m assigned the topic of CORRECTIONS for an Introduction to Criminal Justice course, I could start here.

I have asked three basic journalistic questions—Where, Who, and Why—to generate subtopics and help me figure out what I know and don’t know about the topic. Even though I haven’t done any research, I have a clearer idea of what I would like to pursue: the effects of the Department of Corrections on prisoners’ families.

Your students can combine the brainstorming and clustering exercises by brainstorming a list and then visually clustering the list’s items. 

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Brainstorming

Brainstorming is another crucial prewriting technique.

Brainstorming typically generates a list based on a particular topic instead of writing complete sentences or phrases as you would in free-writing. Like free-writing, brainstorming invites you to get your ideas onto paper before you edit them rather than editing them in your mind and then writing down what’s left.

Brainstorming gives you two assignments:

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Reading Is Generative

Students assume that my research essays are giant hurdle-clearing exercises, as though I’m intentionally putting obstacles in their way that they must clear.

Good research is not an arbitrary impediment to a good essay.

Instead, it helps students generate better arguments than they would have made otherwise.

Outside reading isn’t a hurdle. It’s a trampoline.

You can reinforce this principle in three ways.

  1. Ask students to apply the reading assignment to a new situation. No piece of writing is infinite. Authors can’t address every implication and application of their arguments. Ask your students to do some of that follow-up work. They’ll see that the writing is not an end in itself. It helped them come up with ideas for how to do better work.
  2. Draw attention to how your reading assignments use sources. Let your students see how the best writers in your field draw inspiration from what they read. If they can see how professionals use reading generatively, they’ll also have an idea of how to do it.
  3. Model reading’s generative power in the class. Highlight places where you’ve used outside sources to come up with new ideas about the topic you’re covering in class. There will be plenty of situations to demonstrate how you have used the reading content to make new connections or applications.