Writing for the PhD - Note-taking

How do you take notes - is this really writing? Plus, the Music Highlight

Doing a PhD is all about managing huge amounts of information, and effective note-taking is at the very center of this process. Whether reading research articles, books (by the way, do you write in them and highlight them? I do!), attending conferences, or brainstorming ideas, taking notes is a lot like (or should I say, a lot of) writing.

What I do and how it helps

As PhD researchers, we are constantly engaging with complex ideas, arguments, and theories. How do we go back to our notes, understand what we have just read/heard/noticed, and how do they help us with our own writing? Do they really?

My answer is a big and resounding yes. What I do takes a little bit of time but it really helps me. I have done this since I started my Bachelor degree at 18.

I never missed a lecture and took notes through every single one. I didn’t focus on handwriting so I could get as much down on paper as I could. This was before the Internet, for the younger readers of the newsletter 🙂 If I took notes from books at the library that of course I couldn’t write in, I’d write them really fast again and maybe photocopy a few pages so I could keep the most important stuff written on there. (Shoutout to the librarians at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki back then, who helped us find books at a time when we still couldn’t find them easily and they made every effort to incorporate them into the library! I remember Ms Fotini, I can’t remember her last name, who would help us with every single thing we asked her and would fake-scold me to get out at closing time and go home 🥹📚)

Anyway, back to the notes. I’d usually (and still do) write them on rough paper - then go home and copy them nicely into beautiful notebooks (I still spend my last penny on stationery even though I have a lot) and I’d find myself rewriting a lot of what I’d heard or read, in a way that I could use it for papers I had to write, or just to make it understandable and pleasant to read when I need to go back to it again.

Today, I also have a tablet with a pen that I use sometimes, but 99% of the time I find myself going back to the good old pen and paper.

At the moment you’re taking notes, especially from books or articles, very often you’re paraphrasing things to use in your thesis or research paper or conference presentation. So if that’s not writing (don’t forget to cite properly), what is?

How do you take notes - do you have a specific method? And do you think it’s really writing too?

The Music Highlight

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but I love country music! My dad introduced us to it and there is so much great music coming out today. I even went to a huge Country Music Festival in Gstaad when I lived in Switzerland.

Here is one of my favourites!