Reading and notetaking: combining sources
Doug Specht
Chapter from the book: Specht, D. 2019. The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Specht, D. 2019. The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide.
The author looks further at ways of reading, how to combine information and how to synthesize reading to create complex and interesting essays. Being able to synthesize is vital to realizing really good academic writing. It is a skill that takes practice but going through a step-by-step process improves students writing. The six steps and skills of previewing, annotating, outlining, summarizing and analysing, looking for repetitions and patterns, contextualizing and comparing and contrasting are presented in detail. From here with the student’s notes finished, the process of converting notes into essays is outlined. Three basic ways to present in essay form, information embedded in notes, are mentioned: summarizing, paraphrasing and synthesizing. Contrasting ideas and similar ideas may be synthesized; examples of each approach are given. Quotes are used to support key ideas. The chapter concludes with an example of ideas synthesized in a paragraph whilst referring back to the skills of chapter 4 and the use of paragraph structures as an important building block of writing excellence.
Specht, D. 2019. Reading and notetaking: combining sources. In: Specht, D, The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book42.h
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Published on Nov. 25, 2019