Do you often take notes while your studying process? Is it important to know how to take notes?

The main advantages of good notes:

- They are easily understandable and revisable;

- They save your time;

- They help refresh key issues and collective information of a lecture or a book.

 

Can you add any other advantages to the list?

Read the following advice and add the missing information.

Making your notes effective

Effective note-taking is an important practice to master at university. You have a lot of new knowledge and you need to develop reliable mechanisms for recording and retrieving it when necessary. But note-taking is also a learning process in itself, helping you to process and understand the information you receive.

· Make your notes brief and be …;

· Keep them well-spaced so you can see individual points and add more … later if necessary;

· Show the relationships between the main … (link with a line along which you write how they relate to each other, for instance);

· Use your own words to … - imagine someone has asked you: "So what did X say about this?" and write down your reply;

· Illustrations, examples and diagrams can help to put … in a practical context;

· Make your … memorable using: colour, pattern, highlighting and underlining;

· Read through to make sure they're clear - will you still understand them when you come to …?

· File with care! - use a logical system so you can find them when you need them, but keep it or you won't use it;

· Choose the most suitable way for you to … notes: writing in points, writing in paragraphs or making diagrams, tables or charts.

 

 

details selectivesummarise ideas points revise  shape simple notes

 

Can you give some other hints how to make note taking more effective?

Reading for Fun

You are going to read an extract from “ The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Billy Bryson. What do you know about the author? Read the following text and find out its main idea. What can you say about the author’s style?

GREENWOOD SCHOOL

 

Bill Bryson looks back on his childhood and his elementary school Greenwood, ray elementary school, was a wonderful old building, enormous to a small child, like a castle made of brick. Built in 1901, it stood off Grand Avenue at the far end of a street of outstandingly vast and elegant homes. The whole neighbourhood smelled lushly of old money.

Stepping into Greenwood for the first time was both the scariest and most exciting event of the first five years of my life. The front doors appeared to be about 20 times taller than normal doors and everything inside was built to a similar imposing scale, including the teachers. Everything about it was intimidating and thrilling at once.

It had, for one thing, an auditorium that was just like a real theatre, with a stage with curtains and spotlights and dressing rooms behind. So however bad your school productions were - and ours were always extremely bad, partly because we had no talent and partly because Mrs De Voto, the music teacher, was a bit ancient and often nodded off at the piano - it felt like you were part of a well-ordered professional undertaking (even when you were standing there holding a long note, waiting for Mrs De Voto's chin to touch the keyboard, an event that always jerked her back into action with rousing gusto at exactly the spot where she had left off a minute or two before).

Mostly we played indoors because it was nearly always winter outside. Of course winters in those days, as with all winters of childhood, were much longer, snowier and more frigid than now. We used to get up to 11 feet of snow at a time - we seldom got less, in fact - and weeks of arctic weather so bitter you could pee icicles.

As a scholar, I made little impact. My very first report card, for the first semester of first grade, had just one comment from the teacher: "Billy talks in a low tone." It wasn't even possible to tell whether it was a complaint or just an observation. After the second semester, the report said: "Billy still talks in a low tone."

I was not a pupil popular with the teachers. Only Mrs De Voto liked me, and she liked all the children, largely because she didn't know who any of them were. She wrote "Billy sings with enthusiasm" on all my report cards, except once or twice when she wrote "Bobby sings with enthusiasm." But I excused her for that because she was kind and well-meaning and smelled nice.

All my other report cards - every last one, apart from Mrs De Voto's faithful recording of my enthusiastic noise-making - had blanks in the comment section. There was something about me -my dreaminess and hopeless forgetfulness, my permanent default expression of pained dubiousness - that rubbed my teachers the wrong way. They disliked all children, of course, particularly little boys, but of the children they didn't like I believe they especially favoured me. I always did everything wrong. I forgot to bring official forms back on time. I forgot to bring cookies for class parties and Christmas cards and valentines on the appropriate festive days.

If we were going on a school trip, I never remembered to bring a permission note from home, even after being reminded daily for weeks. So on the day of the trip everybody would have to sit moodily on the bus for an interminable period while the principal's secretary tried to track my mother down to get her consent over the phone. But my mother was always out to coffee. [...]

So the bus would depart without me and I would spend the day in the school library, which I actually didn't mind at all. It's not as if I were missing a trip to the Grand Canyon or Cape Canaveral. This was Des Moines. There were only two places schools went on trips in Des Moines -to the Wonder Bread factory, where you could watch freshly made bread products travelling round an enormous room on conveyor belts, and the museum of the Iowa State Historical Society, the world's quietest and most uneventful building, where you discovered that not a great deal had ever happened in Iowa; nothing at all if you excluded ice ages.

A more regular humiliation was forgetting to bring money for savings stamps. Savings stamps were like savings bonds, but bought a little at a time. You gave the teacher 20 or 30 cents ($2 if your dad was a lawyer, surgeon or orthodontist) and she gave you a number of patriotic-looking stamps - one for each dime spent - which you then licked and placed over stamp-sized squares in a savings stamp book.

One day each week - I couldn't tell you which one now; I couldn't tell you which one then - Miss Grumpy would announce that it was time to collect money for US saving stamps and every child in the classroom but me would immediately reach into their desk or schoolbag and extract a white envelope containing money and join a line at the teacher's desk. It was a weekly miracle to me that all these other pupils knew on which day they were supposed to bring money and then actually remembered to do so. That was at least one step of sharpness too many for a Bryson.

Each year the teacher held up my pathetically barren book as an example for all the other pupils of how not to support your country and they would all laugh - that peculiar braying laugh that exists only when children are invited by adults to enjoy themselves at the expense of another child. It is the cruellest laugh in the world.

Once a month we had a civil defence drill at school. A siren would sound - a special urgent siren that denoted that this was not a fire drill or storm alert but a nuclear attack by agents of the dark forces of communism - and everyone would scramble out of their seats and get under their desks with hands folded over heads in the nuclear attack brace position. I must have missed a few of these, for the first time one occurred in my presence I had no idea what was going on and sat fascinated as everyone around me dropped to the floor and parked themselves like little cars under their desks.

"What is this?" I asked Buddy Doberman's butt, for that was the only part of him still visible.

"Atomic bomb attack," came his voice, slightly muffled. "But it's OK. It's only a practice, I think,"

I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Momes. But evidently they all took the matter seriously for even the teacher was inserted under her desk, too -or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40%. Once I realised that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. Anyway, what were the chances that the Soviets would bomb Des Moines? I mean, come on.

[...] Boy, was I in trouble. I had embarrassed the school. I had embarrassed the principal. I had shamed myself. I had    insulted    my    nation.     [...]

(from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Billy Bryson)

Tongue twisters

1) Vera and William went on vacation to Venice. 2) Once a fellow met a fellow in a field of beans. Said a fellow to a fellow, “If a fellow asks a fellow, Can a fellow tell a fellow What a fellow means?” 3) She saw a fish on the seashore and I’m sure The fish she saw on the seashore was a saw-fish. 4) She sells sea-shells on the seashore. The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure. And if she sells seashells on the seashore, Then I'm sure she sells sea shore shells.

REVIEW

Units 3 – 4