Note Making

Topic – 8

NOTE MAKING

INTRODUCTION

Note-making is an important study skill and needs to be cultivated as part of your academic training. Even after you have completed your formal education, this skill would be of help to you in the discharge of your official duties. As a student you are required to read books, journals, etc. and to consult reference material such as encyclopedia, theses, dissertations, etc. An when you do a job, you may have to read critically and to cull significant information from documents such as business reports, technical proposals, official correspondence, manuals, annual reports, notes on the files, written texts of speeches and briefings, etc. To recall the main ideas in what you have read, it is necessary to make notes. It is difficult for us to keep in mind even important information contained in a variety of material that we read. But with the help of notes we can recall more or less the entire matter read earlier, whenever there is need. Thus note-making is a process of noting down systematically for future reference important information, ideas, facts, view-points and arguments contained in a written text.

The cultivation of this skill would demand from you qualities such as quick comprehension, identification of main ideas, and recognition of their relevance to your needs, besides an ability to record them quickly and concisely. 

While making notes, bear the following points in mind.

● Write down the main ideas as accurately as possible. 

● Keep the notes short but these should be in a form which could be easily understood later. 

● Usually each paragraph contains only one main idea. Abstract it from the topic sentence and record it in your notes. 

● Write the points neatly so that they can be easily read and understood by you. 

● If you reproduce the author's words, put them within quotation marks. If there is a break in the quotation, use a series of three dots to indicate that you have omitted at that place certain words or sentences. 

● While reading the original, you may underline the matter you want to highlight for making notes. This you should do only when the original source belongs to you. It is unethical to do so on borrowed material.

● Use accepted abbreviations and shortened forms of commonly used words. You may invent your own shortened forms for noting the matter.

● Be consistent in the use of abbreviations and shortened forms and stick to one system of ordering the points.

Certain easily understood symbols too can prove useful for keeping your notes short. A few examples are given below.

Examples

The use of abbreviations, shortened forms and symbols would enable you to concentrate on noting the essential points and ideas.

You can use the following framework to make notes. Note the numbering of the main headings, the subheadings and further divisions.

Another system of notation, known as the decimal notation, uses only the Arabic numerals, as shown below.

A short passage and a related set of notes are given below as a sample of note making. There are different forms of environmental pollution. Air pollution is caused by the burning of coal and oil. It can damage the earth's vegetation and cause respiratory problems in humans. A second type of pollution is noise pollution. It is the result of the noise of aircraft and heavy traffic. Further, loud music is also a cause of noise pollution, which has been seen to affect people's hearing and give them severe headaches and high blood pressure. Another source of pollution is radioactivity, which occurs when there is a leak from a nuclear power station. Radioactivity is a deadly pollutant, which kills and causes irreparable harm to those exposed to it. Land and water pollution is caused by the careless disposal of huge quantities of rubbish, sewage and chemical wastes. Pollution of rivers and seas kills fishes and other marine life and also becomes the cause of water-borne diseases. Land pollution, on the other hand, poisons the soil, making the food grown in it unfit for consumption.

Title: Environmental Pollution

A. Air

1. cause

a. burning of coal and oil 

2. effect

a. damage to vegetation

b. respiratory problems in humans 

B. Noise 

1. cause

a. noise of aircraft and traffic.

b. loud music 

2. effect

a. affect hearing 

b. cause bad headaches

c. high up 

C. Radioactivity

1. cause

a. leak from nuclear power station 

2. effect

a. causes injury

b. kills 

D. Land and Water

1. cause

a. careless disposal of rubbish, sewage & chemical wastes

2. effect

a. water pollution

i. kills marine life 

ii. cause water-borne diseases

b. land pollution

i. poisons the soil, makes food grown inedible

The basic procedure remains the same even when you make notes on a longer passage with several paragraphs. You may find that a main heading covers a whole paragraph or sometimes many paragraphs. Subheadings will have to be given under the main headings, and under the subheadings, there could be several divisions, or sub-subheadings.

Notes can be a great help when you are studying for examinations. Read your notes once after making them; then read them again, say a week later, and then after a longer interval. This kind of revision is very effective, especially if you make it an active process by adding new thoughts or ideas that occur to you during your revision in the margin or at the foot of the page. You will also find it useful to make notes on all that you read when preparing to write a paper.

Practice Exercises

Use the framework and make notes of the following passages.

1. Since the 1950s, the number of countries in the world has tripled. Most newly independent countries have given English as special role, making it the dominant or official language in over 60 countries.

In addition there are 75 countries where English is routinely in evidence, publicly accessible in varying degrees, and part of the nation's recent or present identity. Their combined population could now be two billion-more than a third of the world's population-routinely exposed to the English language.

The list includes some countries of Europe where learning English has become a proper prelude to a professional career. Berlitz International, the world's largest language school, says that 70 percent of the five million lessons that it gives each year are for English as compared with 5 to 7 percent for French and slightly fewer for Spanish. 

2. Neuroscientists at the Institute of Psychiatry in London scanned brains of people eating vanilla ice cream. They found an immediate effect on parts of the brain known to get activated when people enjoy themselves.

These include the orpitofrontal cortex, the processing area at the front of the brain. The research was carried out by Unilever using ice cream made by Walls, a company it owns. “This is the first time we've been able to show that ice cream makes you happy. Just one spoonful lights up the happy zones of the brain in clinical trials”, said Don Darling of Unilever.

The scientist used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine-scanners developed to investigate the effects of brain damage and disease-to watch blood flowing to activated brain areas when people swallowed ice cream. Scientists are now discussing the probabilities of using the imaging machine to study brain activity when lies are told and when people fake illness in a bid to investigate the emerging field of social neuroscience.

Doctors have already used scans to show activity in regions associated with deceptiondistinguishing successfully between people hypnotized into being unable to move a leg and others pretending not to be able to do so.

3. In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of the inadequacies of the judicial system in India. Costs are staggering both for the taxpayers and the litigants—and the litigants, or parties, have to wait sometimes many years before having their day in court. Many suggestions have been made concerning methods of ameliorating the situation, but as in most branches of government, changes come slowly.

One suggestion that has been made in order to maximize the efficiency of the system is to allow districts that have an overabundance of pending cases to borrow judges from other districts that have an overabundance of pending cases to borrow use pretrial conference, in which judges meet in their chambers with the litigants and their attorneys in order to narrow the issues, limit the witnesses, and provide for a more orderly trial. The theory behind pretrial conferences is that judges will spend less time on each case and parties will more readily settle before trial when they realize the adequacy of their claims and their opponents' evidence. Unfortunately, at least one study has shown that pretrial conferences use more judicial time than they save, rarely result in pretrial settlements, and actually result in higher damage settlements.

4. The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in a grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his life is not among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people's money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his success with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.

5. There's a tussle going on over how we look after our health. It's not quite an all-our battle and sometimes it's hard to decide who is on which side. It's about control over our bodies; it's about consumer choices; it's about tradition versus innovation. It's the debate about what role complementary or alternative medicine has in modern medical practice.

The definitions of complementary therapies vary from country to country and pinning them down can be hard. Medicine is constantly evolving and some things that were considered alternative just a few years ago can now be considered orthodox. Perhaps a more useful definition is one based on evidence. All medicine is based on some kind of evidence that it works. There are, though, fundamental differences between the evidence base for orthodox medicine and traditional, alternative and complementary medicines.

By the time a pharmaceutical reaches the market, thousands of people, both sick and healthy, would have taken it under the careful supervision of hundreds of doctors. Its ability to treat illness will have been minutely catalogued and many of the consequences of taking it closely analyzed. Doctors prescribing it are encouraged to report any problems-effectively extending the study to the patients they see on a day to day basis.

Contrast this with many traditional treatments. Some of the plants used in Ayurvedic or Traditional Chinese Medicine or African herbal remedies have never been through any type of clinical study. The knowledge of how to use them, what dose to give and what potential problems to watch for comes from traditional teachings.

This information may be centuries old and may never be questioned by the practitioners, just applied by rote as they have been taught.