Old Dogs Do Learn New Tricks

I am postponing my last reflection on my first year as a tenure-track professor in which I plan to talk about how we define success in the field of academia (or life in general). I hope to have that post ready next week. If anyone has comments they would like me to think about or address or include in my post, I'd love to hear from you. just write your suggestions and ideas in the comments to this post.

For now, I want to share a way of doing research that has really worked for me. You'd think after nearly a decade of doing this kind of work that I would have figured out an effective method of reading, taking notes, and transferring what I learn from all that into papers. But I haven't really developed a system I like, until now.

I had two weeks to research and write a conference paper, and the research involved an area I was not terribly familiar with. This required me to work my way through half a century of criticism, an impossible sounding task to me given the time constraints. For starters I followed the method my good friend Matt Mullins suggests in his post here.

Usually when I am reading a book or an article I have my computer right next to me and whenever I come across a passage I may want to quote in the future, or every time I needed to summarize the points made, or every time the reading made me think of an idea, I would stop and type it up. I thought this was the most efficient way to do it, but I began to suspect that my inability to grasp the larger picture of the article's or book's argument was due to the interrupted nature of my reading. Plus, it seemed to take me forever to get through even a short article.

So for this conference paper I have switched things up a bit. The first step was going to Target to buy a packet of those slim little tab sticky notes. I must admit this was at first slightly motivated out of a desire to be cool. Some people I highly respect and think are intelligent (and pretty cool) use them, so I thought maybe I'd become smarter by using them too. Aside from this initially vain motive, however, the tabs are saving my life for this paper.

The next step involves choosing about 3 or 4 books I plan to read that day (its summer, so I have 3-4 hours to devote to uninterrupted reading a day). I read straight through without stopping, using my tabs to indicate passages I want to return to. Either later that afternoon or the next day I devote about an hour to revisiting those books and typing up all the notes and ideas that the tabs direct me to.

I don't know how to explain it, but in 10 days I have gotten through about 2 shelves worth of books using this method. I'm sure some people can get through 10 books in a day, but for me this was record-breaking (not all English majors are fast readers. And some of us suck at scrabble by the way). And in comparing my notes from this method to the quality of notes from my old method, I do not really detect a difference.

The only thing I would like to add to this method would be to write a quick 3-4 sentence summary of the overall aims and arguments of the piece. For some reason that always takes the mental energy I just don't have when I finish reading something, but I do think it would really help capture the "big picture" when I have the whole work freshest in my mind.

So here's to learning how to do things in a new way, nearly a decade later.