Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Ten more

Just reporting that I've got ten more pages of notes for the lit review, bringing me up to 16. This whole note-taking thing is new for me. I've never been a note-taker. I've always read everything I needed to read, made comments in the margins, and then sat down to write it all in a day or two. For my exams I have 110 single-spaced pages of quotes. Not a whole lot of actual notes. Neither of these approaches will work for the dissertation.

So right now I'm trying to briefly summarize each article and freewrite reactions and connections, then include relevant quotes. It's going okay so far. I'm a little nervous, though, about how to make this all work in a year long process. Any advice on note-taking throughout or on writing processes in general would be welcome.

4 comments:

Billie said...

Hi, Abby. I've been doing the same thing, reading and writing, making connections as I go. This is a slow process . . . unlike the writing of a seminar paper, for example, that could be done in a day or two (or at least roughed out). Yea for you, and good job!

Suzanne said...

Here's a gadget for you, Abby: Zotero, a citation manager/note-taking tool that runs in your browser.*

*If it's Firefox 2.0.

Abby said...

Thanks Suzanne. I haven't tried it out yet but, again, hooray gadgets!

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