Academic Writing 1 Slide 11

Research Methods

Session 11 – Extracting Information From Texts And Lectures

Session Overview
In this session and the one after this I will teach you how to arrange your notes to reflect a writer’s focus or main points in order to give prominence to the most important ideas and discuss some other formats for making notes, and how to take notes at lectures.
OBJECTIVES
By the end of this session, you should be able to make an outline note by doing the following
•use an appropriate numbering system
•arrange your notes to reflect the organization of a text

Session Outline
The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows:
•Techniques for making notes from texts
•Outlining
•Other formats
Using the Table Format
Using Clustering or Webbing as note-making format
Using a tree diagram
•taking notes from lectures

Reading List
a)Chapter 5 & 8, Lewis, Jill (2001) Academic Literacy, pp. 122-147; 255-293
b)Chapter 2, Hogue, Ann (2008) First Steps In Academic Writing, pp. 33- 64

Topic One
TECHNIQUE FOR MAKING NOTES FROM TEXTS

Using titles as a note taking technique
•A title summarizes the main point or focus of a book. It therefore serves as a clue to the contents.
•When you are selecting a text to study and to make notes, you need to consider its title. For example, the title of a book that reads ‘A course Book for Writing Skills’, ‘An Introduction to Sociology’, or just ‘Biology’, will give you a comprehensive treatment of the subject.
•A number of books, however, carry sub-titles as well. For example a title which reads ‘The Akan Language: Its Sound System and Tonal Structure’, promises to inform about the sound system (or phonology) of the Akan language. Likewise in the book titled ‘Politics in Ghana: The place of By-elections’, the writer is expected to concentrate on the significance of by-elections in Ghanaian politics.
•Titles therefore guide you to select the appropriate books, articles, etc for your notes on a given topic.

Using chapter headings
•Chapter headings and sub-headings give more specific information than the main title does.
•A chapter heading indicates the aspect of a topic that is being treated while the sub-headings break down this topic into sub-topics.
•Before you make notes on a whole chapter or even read it, you have to survey it by skimming or scanning the sub-headings.

Importance of topic sentences(controlling ideas) in organizing notes
•In textbooks and other academic writings, the topic sentence usually, though not always, comes first in the paragraph or fairly close to the beginning.
•In this sentence, the writer expresses the most important point he or she wants the reader to know or understand about the topic.
•Being able to determine this main idea increases your comprehension of the text. Therefore it is a good reading and note-making strategy to be able to identify the topic sentence.
•This is because all other sentences in the paragraph will relate to the topic sentence.

Using supporting details in note making
•Supporting details develop the controlling idea further. They may do so by elaborating or expanding, comparing or contrasting the main idea, or by introducing a different view.
•In whatever way the supporting details develop the controlling idea, you can list the information contained in them under the sub-heading you create.

Abbreviations
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word, for example, Mr. (Mister), Rev. (Reverend) and SOS (Save Our Souls). Words may be abbreviated differently.
You may abbreviate words by
a)reducing the words to initial letters only e.g. MA (Master of Arts), W.A.E.C (West African Examinations Council)
b)writing the words to a point where they can be recognized, e.g. Prof. (Professor), abbr. (abbreviation)
c)cutting out vowels, as for example in wd (word), world (world), yr (year).
•It is usual to abbreviate words but not all words can be abbreviated. The first group of words that can be abbreviated are those known country-wide or world-wide, and which have already been reduced to abbreviated forms, e.g. UN, UNESCO, USAID etc. The second group consists of commonly occurring words for example Econs (Economics), Ling (Linguistics), Lang (Language) etc.
•The danger in abbreviating rare words is that you may not readily remember the full forms.
•First, abbreviate only long/technical or commonly occurring words in your discipline.
•Second, be consistent with your abbreviations. This will prevent confusion.

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Thank You!