Written Assignments

You should take for any particular assignment, the form in which these notes are made and stored should satisfy four basic criteria :

Your notes must be legible .

b. They must be kept in a flexible system. When writing an essay you will often need to rearrange items of information to suit the purposes of your analysis. Notes made on loose leaf paper or cards can be easily rearranged; notes made ­exercise books or pads cannot.

c. They must be identifiable . Each set of notes should be clearly identified with a heading that lists all of the bibliographic details of the book are article from which the notes were taken (author, title, place of publication, edition, date). This makes it easy for you to check details of fact and quotations with the original source when you write your assignment. It also makes it easy to construct the bibliography or list of references to sources which must be attached at the end of every essay.

d. They should leave room for comment . Wide margins are useful. As you build up your notes you will want to add cross references to other sources and some comments of your own.

Of course the amount of notes you take also depends upon the amount of reading you do. How much should you read? If you read ­ too much or for too long, you will have to use more judgement at the writing stage: if you read too little, your essay may be criticized as `thin'. Much depends on the course, the length of the assignment, the nature of the topic, and the resources available.

Much also depends on how much time and effort you can spare for the task. One first-year course in Political Science provides students with an initial ­reading list of ten items for a 2000-word essay. The lecturer advises students to read a minimum of six to eight items (not whole books but selected chapters and articles) but warns that a good essay would require a lot more reading than this.