How extensive should notes be?

[BakerDad12]

Hey guys, as trials are approaching I need to finalise and consolidate my notes for English. However, I'm struggling to find the 'correct' depth of the notes - should my notes be an act by act or scene by scene analysis, or should they be the key elements of the text summarised?

[angewina_naguen]

Hey guys, as trials are approaching I need to finalise and consolidate my notes for English. However, I'm struggling to find the 'correct' depth of the notes - should my notes be an act by act or scene by scene analysis, or should they be the key elements of the text summarised?

Hey, BakerDad12!

Great question  I'll start off by giving my usual argument for notes based on my own experience. I personally made very limited notes for my texts because I didn't find notes particularly effective for English. I only used my notes to help me start off attempting practice questions and eventually, I found myself remembering all the quotes and techniques I had in them better because I was actually applying them in exam contexts. I've noticed that several students spend an insane amount of time in English making pages full of notes which often don't register in their heads long term, let alone prove useful in the exam.

In answer to your question though, I think act or scene by scene analysis might be excessive at this stage with Trials next term. I would recommend going with a summary of the key elements of the text with textual evidence and analysis. When making your notes, try to find quotes that you can use for multiple themes to prevent you from having to remember as many. I initially had around 30 quotes per text I studied but managed to reduce it all down to 10 quotes per text (6-8 quotes depending on the essay with 2 backup ones in case I got a tricky question) because the examples overlapped across ideas. In short, it's important to make notes with the assessment in mind which, in this case, will be an exam. Make sure you dedicate time to putting your notes into practice and exposing yourself to different types of questions. Hope this helps!

Angelina 

[BakerDad12]

Hi, thanks for the response! When you said you notice many students spending a lot of time on notes, I did that for my human experiences text The Crucible. What I am debating is should I do that for my Mod B notes. When you said make it concise, I'm assuming this would include things like quotes, themes, and a character analysis? Just that?

[angewina_naguen]

Hi, thanks for the response! When you said you notice many students spending a lot of time on notes, I did that for my human experiences text The Crucible. What I am debating is should I do that for my Mod B notes. When you said make it concise, I'm assuming this would include things like quotes, themes, and a character analysis? Just that?

Hey again!

For Module B, I would try to have quotes, themes and character analysis/text-by-text analysis (if you have poems). I would recommend you structure your notes like this or this to ensure you have enough evidence and examples to work with. With Module B, you might also get asked on a really obscure or specific aspect of the text so be prepared to have three or four extra quotes on hand in the event you might get specified a certain character or theme. Let me know if that helps!

Angelina 

[BakerDad12]

Hi, it's me again. I've updated my notes with the advice you've given me and it's starting to look pretty solid. I've got about 10 quotes per text for Adv. but I've also heard some people say they're memorising 20 per text. I'm not sure how many quotes to memorise.  The quotes I do have are long quotes, though, like: “Abigail brings the other girls into the court, and where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel. And folks are brought before them, and if they scream and howl and fall to the floor - the person’s clapped in the jail for bewitchin’ them.”

I'm also unsure on how many themes to discuss. Is doing only 3 broad themes for a text like the Crucible limiting my scope?

Could you elaborate a bit on how you did it?

[angewina_naguen]

Hi, it's me again. I've updated my notes with the advice you've given me and it's starting to look pretty solid. I've got about 10 quotes per text for Adv. but I've also heard some people say they're memorising 20 per text. I'm not sure how many quotes to memorise.  The quotes I do have are long quotes, though, like: “Abigail brings the other girls into the court, and where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel. And folks are brought before them, and if they scream and howl and fall to the floor - the person’s clapped in the jail for bewitchin’ them.”

I'm also unsure on how many themes to discuss. Is doing only 3 broad themes for a text like the Crucible limiting my scope?

Could you elaborate a bit on how you did it?

Hey, BakerDad12!

Great to hear that your notes are starting to take shape! In an essay, I generally recommend preparing for three themes and using anywhere between 3-5 quotes for each (I worked with three per body paragraph which is why I only needed nine quotes in total for my essay plus a backup one). However, you might also want to prepare two backup themes with the same number of quotes in case you get a question that specifies one of your themes. For example, let's say you prepared to discuss reputation, judgement, responsibility as your main three themes with power and fear. You could get a question like this that requires you to explore this major theme in respects to your other themes.

"Explore the prevalence of fear as a key motivation for the individuals represented in The Crucible."

That doesn't mean you have to memorise 25 quotes or anything along those lines. What I did was choose quotes that worked for multiple themes. As an example, Proctor says to Abigail in Act I "a wild thing may say wild things” which you could use as an example of foreshadowing for the themes of responsibility, power and fear. I then grouped all my quotes under themes to see where the overlaps were and which of my themes were the strongest. This prevented me from having to memorise an excessive amount 

I also would recommend having shorter quotes because you are really only analysing techniques, not entire judgements like you would at university level, in HSC English and often, the techniques are not the entire three sentences like you have there. You only need to quote what is being analysed and you can either omit the rest with ellipses or just use it for another piece of analysis for a different theme. With the one you have provided, if you wanted to analyse biblical allusion, you would only need a small portion of the first sentence; "where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel." The rest of it is not as relevant  It also saves you heaps of time under exam conditions and you can spend that time instead writing amazing analysis and polishing your response!

Ultimately, you want to work smarter, not harder so if you can limit the amount of time you spend memorising the quotes you have, you can spend more time actually applying them in practice responses and seeing what other gaps in your study that you might need to address. Hope this helps and let me know if there's anything you wanted me to clarify!

Angelina 

[BakerDad12]

Hey, what you said helped! Thanks. I'm in a bit of a conflict because my teacher is saying memorise around 15-20, but I like your idea as well. I think I might go for a nice middle ground of 12. Anyway, that's not my question. My question is, I have three themes prepared for the Crucible: conformity, power and integrity. Because human experiences is so broad, do you think I should prepare more themes or be familiarise myself with adapting those three to the question?

[angewina_naguen]

Hey, what you said helped! Thanks. I'm in a bit of a conflict because my teacher is saying memorise around 15-20, but I like your idea as well. I think I might go for a nice middle ground of 12. Anyway, that's not my question. My question is, I have three themes prepared for the Crucible: conformity, power and integrity. Because human experiences is so broad, do you think I should prepare more themes or be familiarise myself with adapting those three to the question?

Hey again!

If your teacher's provided some advice, you can definitely consider it as well for the HSC but with Trials around the corner, go with whichever strategy you are most comfortable with 

As for your themes, I would recommend perhaps having one backup theme just in case it might be more applicable to the question you get under exam conditions. Otherwise, those three should be more than enough to allow you to have an in-depth discussion on any of the concepts from the rubric  Hope that helps and good luck!

Angelina