Note Taking Strategies

[CarlieE]

How do you guys take notes on an entire book that you need to summarize? People tell me to skim, which I can't bring myself to do. Lately I have been trying to summarize each page in a separate notebook and write down important quotes, but this is so time consuming. I can't being myself to quit w/ the excessive summarizing, but know my reading would go by so much more quickly if I just read the damn book and tried to go find quotes and summarize the main arguments later.

 

Skimming can be tough - for me it's the absorption part, getting things to stick... So, if it's a whole book and I'm having a hard time skimming, I write 1 or 2 sentences next to each paragraph (in the margins) which summarizes the gist of that paragraph. At the end of the section I give a short few sentences (in the margins) about the argument of that section (or chapter) and the evidence pointed to; and then at the end of the whole book I can look back at my quick notes in the margins and mentally summarize the larger argument of the whole piece. If it's a particularly difficult topic to digest I use a fly page and write in a short paragraph summarizing the whole thing. 

 

I also use color pencils to make certain key sentences in each paragraph pop out. Usually at the beginning or end of each paragraph is The Thing that the writer wants us to "get". 

 

Of course, I buy and keep all my books - they always seem to come back in some way. 

 

Just a note though: the style of older scholarship ie. 18th-19th century stuff can be harder to break down this way; the style of writing does not always lend itself well to my method.