The ‘free writing’ techniques that Peter Elbow has developed are extremely useful to integrate into any part of your note-making . After you have read through an article put it out of sight and write ( without stopping and without crossing out ) on the following prompts. begin the process by copying out these words

What I got out of this article was…..

What interested me the most in this this article was….

What I found most confusing in this article was….

What I want to follow up from this article is……….

Next week we are going to practise re-drafting a piece of work from the readers’ point of view. So, if you have a draft you want to work on , bring it along. Otherwise bring a text you are currently reading or a plan you are working on and we will workshop those. Look forward to seeing all and any postgrads who want to come on Thursday 9.30-11.30 am in the Library, LCNW 2.005D.

Regards

Julia

In this workshop people divided into two groups:those who wanted to focus on reading and those who wanted to focus on writing.

Reading strategies:

Again this was focused on thinking about and developing a template for making notes as we plough through the reading. These templates can be polished and improved upon as the meaning and significance of the research develops but the easy one to begin with is:

Biblographical details

key words

summary para

analysis of article paragraph

application to my research question paragraph

and drawing this as a chart does seem to help!

The other template to have in front of you as you read is the one that assists you to capture the key components of the writing style of the author that you wold like to emulate.

As you read through the text mark it up for the structure of the argument by identifying when a paragraph is working as an explanation or expansion of a key point; when a paragraph is working as evidence to support the argumennt and when a paragraph is illustrating the argument or conclusion by giving an example. This can be noted quickly withput stopping the flow of your reading and then later look back and see if you particularly like the way the author has placed these paragraphs in realtion to their main argument. Would you like to use a similar approach in your writing?

Also as you read have a highlighter that you have designated as just for transition words and mark these as you go. Are these useful words and phrases for you to work with in your writing? Do you tend to over rely on just a few transition words ?

Here are some  transition words and phrases.
Besides    For example    As
Furthermore    For instance    Because
In addition    In particular
Indeed    Particularly    Due to
In fact    Specifically    For
Moreover    To demonstrate    For the reason that
Second…Third…,etc.    To illustrate    Since
Accordingly    Although
In hope that    Finally    However
In order to    Consequently    In comparison
So    Hence    In contrast
So that    So    Likewise
With this in mind    Therefore    Nevertheless
Thus    On the other hand
Similarly Whereas Yet

These note making strategies are useful to help us to read for both content knowledge and improved writing skils.

Hi all

If you were at the workshop today and other useful points emerged that I have not included in my summary, please add by posting into the comment box, which you will find by clicking onto comments.

Many thanks

Julia

What a wonderful range of postgrad students came along today! From honours level to Phd’s ; from chemistry to psychology and from a myriad different places in the world.

Reviewing the material we covered I would say the key point that emerged was the distiction between the product of the document(Lit Review) and the process of achieving that end result.

We covered the importance of building an annotated bibliography and a masters  by research student shared the ‘table method’ of keeping track of your readings and notes.

Draw a table and the first box is the authors name, then the title of the article, then methodology, results, key words etc.

Another way to manage the accumalation of data that postgraduate students end up with is to use the endnote soft ware system.

Whatever system is used I think the most important point is to have a system!

As we move from a collection of notes gathered from a range of texts we can also file those notes in a number of different ways.

In folder 1 (F1)

I like the idea of filing  3 paragraphs that I write after I read an article.

Para: 1 is a summary of the article

Para:2 is my critical response to the article

Para 3: is my thinking about how this article might be applied to my research question/topic.

In folder 2 (F2) I can make responses and comments on what I learn about the correct style of writing in my discipline after reading this article.

Folder 3 ( F3) I can file all the paras that are critical response ( c) and group them together. Then I can file all the paras that are about the application of ideas/theories/methods to my research topic and group them together.

This is a way to start to pick out the patterns in the texts and bring to the foreground the themes that are important in the literature. It is also a way to move from a collection of notes that is author dominant to a collection that is theme or issue dominant.

Be careful in F3 that you keep track of which para comes from which text though. You need to cross reference it to F1 to do this.

Hi All

Don’t forget the kick off for the postgraduate writing seminar is this Thursday, 5 March 9.30-11.30am.

Hope to see lots of you there in the library, NW level 2 LC 2.005D

Bring along anything that you are currently working on or if you have just staretd postgrad studies we will workshop  writing the lit review.

And as I did last semester all the tips and ideas you come up with will be posted here so we can keep a record of it.

see you on thursday

Julia