Study Guide

Reading

No Highlighting!

Don't highlight. It's a lousy habit and I strongly encourage students to break themselves of it if they have it.

Why is highlighting bad? Because it tricks you into thinking you are learning. Here's how it works.

You read. You are (presumably) looking to identify "important" information, where "important" here usually means "stuff I think is going to be on an exam." Hey, I was a student once, too. Let's face it, nobody gets out their highlighter to read a novel.

So, when you find a part you think is important, you highlight it. Then you go on. You think you have done something significant, but you haven't.

First of all, the only way to recover this information is to thumb through your book again, scanning for yellow bits (or your color of choice—the fun part of highlighting is the colors!). This is wasteful of time, first of all.

Once you re-scan, what do you do? You just read it again, often just the highlighted part. What good is that? You often will either highlight a mere word or phrase, so it lacks context, or else you highlight entire paragraphs.

The entire-paragraph approach isn't so bad, but all you will do is re-read what you've already read. At best this means you will rehearse facts, but that's not what I want you to do.

What I want is for you to learn. The way you learn is you internalize information. The way you internalize is you re-cast information into your own words, into your own terms, into your own understanding.

That's why highlighting is bad—because ultimately the information remains outside, external to you, perhaps known but certainly not understood. In the end, you will be failing yourself, short-changing yourself.

There are other reasons highlighting is bad. One worth mentioning is that it marks up the book. Who cares, right? You're just going to sell it back. Okay, fair enough. But when you shop a used book, do you pick the one that's free of markings or the one with underlining and highlights? Right. Marking up a book devalues it for the next student. Book prices are too high already. Give the next student a break!

Even if you keep the book—especially if you keep the book—you should not mark it up. Why? Because any markings you make represent your current reading of that book. It will likely be years before you read it again. When a book has marks, your eye is naturally drawn to the highlighting. You have to fight past that to read the text a different way. Especially if you are simply reviewing a book at the end of the current semester, for an exam, you will tend to read it the way you highlighted it. Do you really think your first reading is the best reading?

Notes

Okay, enough with the rant. If I don't want you to highlight, what is it I want you to do?

Take notes. This is absolutely one of the most important study habits you can ever acquire, and it goes way beyond academic study. It's one of those life-habits that pay dividends repeatedly.

How you do this is up to you. There are many approaches. I'll name three, but before discussing the mechanics, I need to explain what goes into your notes.

Always remember: for this course, anyway, you are taking notes in order to participate in discussion. This means you will have three kinds of notes: comments, replies, and questions.

The comment note is one where you have read something and you want to make a comment on it. Perhaps you dispute what's said, or you have made a connection between this and some other information. Whatever the inspiration, summarize the passage and sketch out your comment. Do not copy the passage. Ever. Re-state it in your own words. And remember to at least sketch your comment, or else you'll forget what it was that motivated you to make the note in the first place.

A reply note is where someone has said something on the board and you wish to reply. Often this will simply be a question someone asked and you've found the answer, but it might also be an on-going discussion with differing points of view. Again, rephrase what is said, add your own comments, and note the source complete with page number or url.

A question note is the one most often neglected by students, but it's the easiest of all to do. If you don't understand something, make a note of it! The trouble is, we often believe we understand something when in fact we do not. If you can condition yourself to be ever critical, ever-questioning of your own understanding, you will find first that you will generate tons of questions (and will easily meet the participation requirements!) and second that you will learn a ton more than you would have otherwise.

Note-taking Tools

One is what I call the journal approach. Here you use a notebook and devote it to a single book. I like to use those smaller ones with maybe 50 or 70 pages in them. I write the name of the work right on the outside. The ones with glue binding fit better in file drawers but don't open conveniently; the sprial notebooks open better but take up more space. The key to note-taking here is to use plenty of white space. You've got far more pages than you're likely to use, so space things out to make it easier to scan and review.

The second approach is to use file cards. This is recommended for use in whatever your major is, especially if you plan to do extended study. File cards are good because you can re-sort them in a variety of ways, flip through them very quickly, and find what you want. The basic rule of thumb with note cards is: one idea per card. Don't worry about using all the space. One idea per card. Size of the card is entirely up to you. I like 3x5 because it encourages me to be focused. Also, put author and at least a short title on each, and write the date you took the note. There's lots of information available on the subject of note cards and research.

The third approach is to use the computer. I put this last because I have never found this to be very convenient. There are note-taking programs: the best ones integrate with your word processor and can do cool stuff like generate your bibliography automatically. Pretty much for serious scholars only. Otherwise, just toss stuff into whatever tool is most convenient for you--probably your word processor. Organization is the great challenge here, and there are dozens of approaches.

On Reading the Primary Sources

Much of what was said about reading textbooks applies here: read critically, take notes, don't fall behind. The major difference is that the primary sources will generally be more difficult to read because of the language and the concepts, both of which will be rather foreign to us.

My advice is simple to give, difficult to implement: read even more critically, take even more notes, allow extra time.