Brooke Notes
I am either the best or the worst person to ask about how to take notes. I’m actually horrible at it — for most of my life, I’ve relied upon memory and marginalia as my primary storage methods. Now that I’m old(er), I realize how fragile that approach has proven to be. But I do have the perspective of having wished that I’d done things differently and over the years, I’ve developed an alternative approach that embodies that perspective and I’ve worked it into my graduate pedagogy. I’ve had lots of former students tell me that it’s valuable, so it’s something that I try to share often.
This essay outlines my personal system for note-taking, but it also places it in the context of my approach to graduate courses. So it’s longer than it strictly needs to be, but I hope that it’ll be of some use.
First, some principles:
Note-taking should be sustainable. Reading notes are like New Years’ resolutions: it’s easier to do elaborate, multi-page reading notes at the beginning, when your motivation is high and you have lots of time, but at the end of a semester, when the work piles up, that becomes a standard that’s nearly impossible to maintain. My grad school notebooks always started out super-detailed and ended up cryptic and near-useless. So my rule of thumb is to try and develop a habit that can be consistent throughout: no more than 5–10 minutes spent on notes for an article/chapter, no more than 20 minutes for a book.
Don’t treat yourself as the primary audience for reading notes. Reading notes are not a substitute for reading the text itself, nor should they be. Instead, the best notes give you enough information to decide whether or not to read the text. Instead of approaching reading notes as a mirror, then, think of them instead as relays. Imagine that you are writing them for someone whose time is limited and who must decide whether the text is worth a portion of that time. 5 or 10 years down the road, you yourself will be that someone, but at the moment that you are taking notes, imagine that you are preparing them for a colleague who is relying on your judgment.
As you’ll see below, my recommendation is to work with a fairly standardized, uniform format for these notes. There are a couple more principles that lead me in that direction:
Your note-taking should be shareable (and shared). This is subtly different from my point above about audience. Even if future-you is the primary audience for your notes, I recommend writing them as though you plan to share them with your colleagues (and in my courses, I often ask students to do so). If you return to my original blog post on this topic, you’ll see that I make a big deal out of resisting the “patterned isolation” that the academy fosters. It has never made sense to me that several people (classmates, colleagues, e.g.) reading the same text should each spend their limited time writing up reading notes that, in all likelihood, will overlap significantly with those of their compatriots. If it’s a text of particular importance to you, then you may indeed want your own notes, but otherwise? You’ve spent hours (over the course of a semester) duplicating the efforts of others. I would rather sacrifice a little flexibility (in agreeing to a standard format) in favor of the time and energy saved by aggregating those efforts.
Note-taking can be (fruitfully) aggregated. This leads to another principle that I’ve relied on in my pedagogy. I frequently invite students to aggregate their note-taking. Rather than asking them all to read the same set of texts, I might have them read 1–2 articles in common and then add a couple that relate but tie more closely to their own interests. Depending on the size of the class, then, students might collectively be producing reading notes for 20–30 articles/chapters in a given week, and hundreds over the course of a semester. If they share those with each other, they’ve generated a substantial database of scholarship that would have otherwise been nearly impossible. Instead of 10 sets of virtually identical/slightly differentiated reading notes, they leave my courses with 10 times the notes on a sizable range of texts. Have they “read” all of those texts? Of course not. But they will have a much better sense of whether and which to read.
I can’t stress enough that standardization is the key to this. Although I offer my own recommendations below, I make no claim to having discovered the best model. But it’s important, in a note-taking collective, to be spending roughly the same time and effort on them and to be looking at the same categories. I’m not ashamed to admit that I actually spend time in class calibrating — we practice on sample essays and we practice in different modalities (close read, skim, etc.). And we talk about the results, how much overlap there is among our efforts, where we can cut corners in terms of time, etc.
Part of me will always resist the idea of standardization, because different folks/strokes and all that, but I think it’s important to make the notes scannable and consistent. Notes should be brief enough that one can execute them quickly (when time is short) but elaborate enough that they’re useful 5 or 10 years down the road when the text has left one’s memory. For me, this means keeping them to about a page, and doing them in a format that should take no more than about 15 minutes for an article or chapter. So here’s what I typically ask from the notes for an article or chapter.
· Lastname, Firstname. Title. (When my students used blogs to do this, this was the post title)
· Full MLA citation of article/chapter (something that can be copy/pasted into a bibliography)
· Abstract (50–75 words, copy/pasted if the original already has an abstract)
· Keywords/tags (important terminology, methodology, materials, theoretical underpinnings)
· 2–3 “key cites” — whose thoughts/texts does this article/chapter rely upon?
· 2–3 “crucial quotes” — copy/paste or retype the 2–3 most important passages from the essay
· 1–2 questions — either questions that are answered by the text, or questions it raises for further exploration
And that’s it. I’ve futzed around with different categories, but these are the ones that have stuck with me through multiple iterations of my note-taking protocol. Notes aren’t meant to be a substitute for reading — they are a relay, not a mirror — but this basic info is almost always enough to tell you whether to read more closely. And it’s meant to be quick.
When I first started doing this, I asked students to print out copies of their notes and exchange them in class (the 3-ring binder database!). Later, we turned to blogging platforms, which are particularly well-suited to this model. Nowadays, we might use Trello boards or an end-of-semester Zotero export. I like to think that this is adaptable to multiple platforms.
There’s a pedagogical principle buried in here as well that may be worth making explicit: I am increasingly unlikely to teach courses where each student reads the same exact things as every other student. The most productive conversations that I have aren’t with people who’ve read all the same things as I have, but with those who bring different ideas and texts to our discussions. Such conversations lead me in new directions, give me new leads to track down, and provoke me to new thoughts. I feel like this is an ideal that is often missing from our graduate classrooms, that sometimes rely overmuch on the conceit of a group of people huddled around a common text. To put it in social network terms, class discussions should rely more upon the “weak ties” of its participants. But that’s my own preference.
A next-to-final note: It never occurred to me to describe these as “Brooke Notes,” because so much of what I describe above feels like common sense to me. But I’ve had a few former students go on to teach this model of note-taking, and to attribute it to me, so I’ve gone with that. While I certainly appreciate the attribution, I’d rather see folks take up these practices without my name attached than ignore them because it is. Feel free to take anything here and use it, and if you can throw me a link, I’d appreciate it.
And finally, all of this seems really obvious to me now but I can tell you that, when I was in graduate school, it wasn’t. I can’t tell you how happy it would make me now to have taken notes like these on everything I’ve read since grad school. Especially for all those things that I’ve forgotten I’ve even read (and there are many. Many.) As a result, I devote significant time to discussing note-taking in nearly every graduate course I teach, and we spend time practicing these formats and methods. I can tell you from experience that your students will thank you.
[This is a revision of a blog entry I posted in 2014: http://www.cgbrooke.net/2014/01/16/reading-notes/. Having shared it with many people, I wanted to clean it up a bit, provide more detail, etc. I’ll probably continue revising it, but for the moment (Fall 2021), it’s stable. -cgb]
