<p>Granny merlin would like opinions on how some folks take notes from very dense Journal articles, please. My Introduction and Survey to the Old Testament class has this one journal article which is mad dense and difficult. I have read, it, color coded it, and am on the verge of taking it out to a four star restaurant of its choosing in hopes of learning more about it and possibly seducing it.</p>
<p>What do some of you folks do when you have to really absorb a dense Journal article in order to try and earn a high mark on a test? I cannot quite outline it nor cornell note it at all.</p>
<p>Read it. Then read it again. And again. And again. If you still aren't making any progress, go talk to your prof about the trouble you're having. </p>
<p>I don't take notes on journal articles. I just read them as many times as it takes to grok them, and sometimes discuss them with other students.</p>
<p>Personally I just sort of...write stuff. I start out with a general idea and then any sub-ideas I indent under that one by a little bit. I try to write it so that if I had to re-teach it to someone who hadn't been to the class or read the book, I'd have enough info to explain it. I never did well with structured note-taking.</p>
<p>You guys are lucky you don’t know what Cornell Notes are – my high school required them for just about everything. It’s not a bad note-taking style per se, but it’s obviously not for everybody, and yet many people in academic circles think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Gad.</p>
<p>Oh it is just soo sexy to use the Cornell notetaking. This hyperlink above my post even lets you make you own darned paper using it. You can put your own name and the subject and date directly on paper configured for the Cornell notetaking method. My goodness, I am surprised my parental filter did not pop up and block the sexiness of this Cornell notaking app.</p>
<p>Lawd.</p>
<p>I still hate reading this one journal article for my one theology class. All the author is doing is just contradicting herself every other paragraph. I hate that. It is like I will say this...and then I will say something diametrically opposed to this...and then that is all. </p>
<p>Well, I thank you all very much for your responses.</p>
<p>I find some of these "scholarly journals" to be way above my head. Now I can read just fine, but they're written in a fashion that a blue collar type guy like me can't understand them.</p>
<p>What I have done on some of these is sit down with an English teacher from my middle school (who helped me with a journal in my high school years and said to let her know if I run into one again) and we sort of paraphrase it together.</p>
<p>I think growing up in a blue collar town sort of hurt my vocabulary skills. We're not full of rich lawyers and doctors, most of the folks in my first neighborhood were either guys without a college degree or people who just worked in an office building (not sure how far they went in business as far as college courses). No CEOs, doctors, lawyers, etc. So nobody was there to use the big words in context.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I find some of these "scholarly journals" to be way above my head. Now I can read just fine, but they're written in a fashion that a blue collar type guy like me can't understand them.
[/quote]
The fashion is quite deliberate (and affected, IMHO). If you get a paper published you want it to sound deep and to appear to represent a lot of work. Honestly I think more work in many of them goes into turning the prose into something impenetrable than in actually doing the work. After all if you write a psych paper and say "we shocked some rats and guess what -- they jump out of the box to avoid the shock" that doesn't sound too amazing or publishable. But fill the paper with schedules of reinforcement, talk of antecedents, and references to three dozen other papers (which themselves each reference dozens of other papers) and you have something that nobody can quickly read and understand -- which is probably the point.</p>
<p>Is this journal article available on line? It's difficult to say what kind of note taking method would work unless we can read a portion of the article. Could you post a sample paragraph or a link?</p>
<p>It is not online to the best of my knowledge</p>
<p>It is just one of those papers which have a contradictory tone throughout the whole work</p>
<p>No big deal. </p>
<p>It is for Theology. And this is my first experience with academic papers dealing wth Theology. My only other experience is with academic papers dealing with literature, and that is way different. </p>
<p>It is all cool.</p>
<p>I thank you all.</p>
<p>peaceout,</p>
<p>your granny merlin</p>
<p>ps</p>
<p>merlin is my nic name (you know, in real life and all)
and my younger brothers and pals are starting to call me granny because I am the go to person if someone needs help!
so my new nic is granny merlin:)</p>
<p>My printed somehow did this weird form of "banding", so I somehow printed out this article where like every third sentence was gone!</p>
<p>I noticed that when I scanned the pdf file for the article through my natural reader software. And, then...my friends...I died.</p>
<p>This whole time, I have been trying to figure out this article because I have a double major in Theology and Lit. and this one class is like my first big time Theology class. So, I have been trying to do super well. Only to find out that my printer messed the article up. </p>
<p>It was weird because it somehow skipped sentences! </p>