Academic Writing Complete Guide
Why read academic articles?


1.4 Taking Notes
The structure of your notes hinges on the type of reading you are doing, what you are reading for, and your style of learning. For a visual learner, tactics like spider diagrams or mind maps that show how arguments are linked can apply. If you have an article that is giving the two sides of a topic, you can write the ‘for’ or ‘against’ list of notes. If a topic has several perspectives, you can arrange your notes as a list of issues with each perspective pinned against them. If you are reading for information only, you can use a flowchart or a timeline necessary to track the processes.
As you are evaluating and writing notes, do not forget about your purpose, failure to which you will only summarize the text and form not a concrete opinion on it. You can stop severally midway in your writing to ponder the information you have read. You never know, this can be the best time to formulate a mind-map or a spider diagram.
Exercise
Reading introduction and conclusions can be useful. However, you need to gauge the amount of information they provide and then list the important points of the book or article. Identify useful topics that can use the material from this resource. Identify any weaknesses in the argument presented by the authors.
Test some of the note taking techniques in one of your articles and make a comparison. You will be able to identify what suits you and what helps with your learning style.