Brooke Notes (~45 minutes)
Brooke Notes are a note-keeping system designed to be routine, generative, usable, and accumulative throughout and beyond your undergraduate studies. This approach to note-keeping, which I credit to Collin Brooke, takes as its first principle that if it is worth reading, it is worth annotating. Even more, reading as a part of research writing means that the notes should be right-sized (i.e., neither excessively thorough nor too thin to be useful later on) and built-up in a database that you can search later on (your Google folder, in this case).
Here are a few general provisions for Brooke Notes:
- Develop your notes entry while the reading is reasonably fresh, preferably within a few hours of reading and never more than a day later.
- Set a timer. Try to keep the development of your notes entry to under an hour.
- One Brooke notes entry should be between 400-1000 words. Longer entries make sense for complex or inspirational articles and book-length works. Briefer entries are appropriate for most academic articles.
- Such note-keeping practices are habitual and accumulative; they will over time amount to a personal archive invaluable to the development of lit reviews and a reliable, lasting resource of personal knowledge.
Learn more about the rationale for this approach and the basic guidelines for developing a Brooke Notes entry over here: http://www.cgbrooke.net/2014/01/16/reading-notes/. Each entry should—at a minimum—include the following:
- A title. Lastname, Firstname. Title of article, abbreviated, if necessary.
- A full citation adhering to MLA or APA style. This should be complete and correct, ready to copy into a bibliography, references list, or works cited.
- A 3-5 sentence summary, or an abstract. This should capture concisely what is the focus of the reading. If an abstract is already available, it is fine to copy/paste it into your notes. But writing your own abstract is excellent practice, too, as such summaries are challenging and require a thorough sense of the reading.
- Keywords/tags. A list of 5-10 keywords or phrases that index the entry in terms of important words and phrases, approaches it takes to research, sites/materials/objects of analysis (i.e., what it is about), and prominent names or topics.
- 2-3 citations. These are sources cited in the reading that you consider especially important, insightful, and possibly worthy of your tracking them down as reading cascades into further reading. Include the full citation information.
- 2-3 quotations. These are gem passages, either for the ways they capture striking ideas, pose questions, or connect with things you are thinking about, working on, or considering important. Include a parenthetical page or paragraph number to make the quotation easy to locate later on.
- 1-2 questions. These are questions you formulate that articulate the edges of wonder and prime further exploration.
A complete Brooke Notes entry will include all seven of these elements. Project One will require you to develop Brooke Notes entries for at least two articles.
Contact Information
Derek N. Mueller, PhDProfessor
Department of English
Virginia Tech
Office: 315 Shanks Hall
Phone: +1-734-985-0485 (Google voice)
dmueller@vt.edu
http://derekmueller.net/rc/
