How to Take Notes to Become a Stronger Reader
Many of my students lack the conceptual knowledge and vocabulary to understand complex texts. Here is how we take notes to help remedy this problem.
Example Notes:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17T3r...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iWMv...
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To become a better reader and understand complex ideas, you need to improve both your conceptual knowledge and academic vocabulary. For example, in this article on altruism by David Brooks, readers must understand a variety of concepts and ideas in order to comprehend the text. If readers don’t have at least some knowledge on topics such as Western society, psychology, capitalism, and financial incentives–they will be lost. And if readers haven’t acquired the vocabulary needed to understand words such as propensity, suppositions, bias, evoke, and altruism–the readers (once again) will be lost.
This is why taking notes and looking up the meanings of concepts and words is important. It is only when a reader has an understanding of the key terms in a text that he/she can begin to unlock the deeper meanings, inferences, and arguments being made by the writer.
An effective way of taking notes to improve your conceptual knowledge and academic vocabulary is by interacting with your notes. This consists of writing down facts or ideas followed by your own responses to those concepts. Think of it as a conversation on paper–and a way to process your thinking.
For example, if the term you are researching is “Western society,” you could write something like this. As you can see the notetaker first writes down a fact or idea, then gives his/her understanding of what it means. What is important is that the notetaker documents how he/she is processing the information. After taking down notes, and responding to those ideas, it is important that the notetaker explains what each concept or word means in his/her own words. This is how we learn to take ownership of our knowledge—by elaborating on ideas and concepts in our own way.
So your mission for the following task is to identify concepts and vocabulary you don’t understand, or know little about. Then research those terms by writing down facts and ideas, and interacting with those concepts. Do this by having a conversation on paper. Once you have a grip of what each term means–attempt to write a definition in your own words.