This document provides guidance on effective note taking techniques called "Triage Reading". It recommends reading with urgency but not haste, and taking notes from the outside to the inside of the text in a fastidious manner. When taking notes, the document suggests asking questions to evaluate the author's qualifications, potential biases, opinions versus evidence, and relevance to your topic in order to take focused notes. It concludes by asking how insights from reading will be documented.
these are the guided notes doctors and nurses take when assessing a patient in a triage situation.
walking wounded are fine
breathing is central starting point - what is it for you? your topic? or question?
What are the critical criteria that will help you make important decisions efficiently? Then what action steps do you take to keep the research moving?
Three criteria should be Purpose, Audience, Scope
Scope-What kind of research: library, survey, fieldwork (SYP = all of the above)?
Fieldwork: How will you do it?
How long?
How many sources?
What are the steps: outlines, rough drafts, final drafts, bibliography, Presentations?
Audience-Think about for whom you are writing
How familiar are your readers with subject?
What do they know/not know?
What aspects of your subject will interest them?
What background info do you need to provide?
What are the preconceived ideas/beliefs your readers might have on your subject?
Do you want to inform, change, or persuade your readers?
Purpose-Analysis/Examination requires a look at an issue in detail, explaining how it evolved, who/what it affects, and what is at stake
Review of Scholarship requires summaries of what key scholars and researchers have written about the issue
Survey requires you to gather opinion about particular issue.
Evaluation requires you to make critical judgments
Argument requires you to assemble evidence in support of claim you make.
this is what triage looks like in war
twenty-five scattered sources and
seven websites waiting to be read.
3,423 pages in total.
At an average rate of one page every two minutes, this will take you
6,846 minutes to read, or, 114.1 hours.”
There has to be a way to determine what is critical and what can wait
Badke calls this “reading as glutton or as connoiseur”
1. You need information. The source you are reading has information. The problem is that it has too much information that is not relevant to your research topic. Thus you need to use every skill you have to sift quickly through what you don’t need and fi nd what you do need.
with two others, in seven days. Be fastidious.
Read what you need and abandon the rest. It’s your only hope.
1. title page, preface, foreword, and
introduction, subtitle
2. table of contents - the good, the bad, and
the useless for your purposes.
3. the index- good, atrocious, or nonexistent.
4. a run-through - beginning/endings of every
chapter, summary sections
One big note of caution: we are not urging you to read out of
context. You have to read enough of an author’s work to have a good
idea of his or her main message. It’s all very well to be effi cient
and discerning (the connoisseur) rather than a mindless sponge (the
glutton), but be very sure you have grasped, not only what the author
is saying, but why the author is saying it.
What is the author saying? What’s the point?
What point of view or background of the author?
What biases do you discern?
Is the author really dealing with issues?
Are there some things missing/minimized?
ask yourself...
are you a prolific copy /paster - get it all, sort it later
bookmark it and web sort it, pearltree
low-tech - quoter, summarizer, paraphraser(NEVER),