Page 57 - DENG101_Communication Skills-I

Communication Skills-I

Notes 5.6.4 Effective Note Making

Your note making technique and presentation should be such that you don’t need to waste time
re-writing them. Following are some points that should be kept in mind while making notes:
Making notes means that you do not have to write fully expressed sentences: they must however
be in your own words and clear enough for you to be able to read them when you come back to
them.
Don’t simply copy out of textbooks: put the notes into your own words. To be able to do this,
you will have to ensure full understanding of the topic. This understanding makes for effective
learning.
Although you can copy out direct quotations from the text, you should keep these to minimum:
where you feel a quotation is particularly apt, or where it expresses an idea so clearly that you
could not put it better yourself, even in note form, only then you should quote verbatim.

Leave lot of space in between major points: this will let you add points later and will make it
quicker and easier to re-read your notes.
Always review your notes: fill in gaps, sort out misunderstandings, and make summaries of

topics to enhance your understanding of the material.

Example: Note Making
Below is a passage about a girl called Genie who was raised in a very deprived environment.

Genie

Genie, a Californian girl was locked in a room from the age of about one and a half until she
was over thirteen (Curtiss, 1977). Genie’s father kept his wife, who was going blind, more or less

completely confined to the house. The main connection between the family and outside world
was through a teenage son, who attended school and did the shopping.
Genie had a hip defect from birth that stopped her learning to walk properly, and her father
frequently beat her. When Genie was twenty months old, he apparently decided that she was
retarded and ‘put her away’ in a closed room with the curtains drawn and the door shut. She
stayed in that room for the next eleven years, seeing the other members of the family only when
they came to feed her. Genie had not been toilet trained, and spent part of her time harnessed,
naked, to an infant’s potty seat. Sometimes at night she was removed, only to be put into another
restraining garment, a sleeping bag within which her arms were imprisoned. Tied up in this
way, she was also enclosed in an infant’s cot with wire mesh sides and a mesh cover overhead.
Somehow in these appalling circumstances she endured the hours, days and years of her life. She
had almost no opportunity to overhear any conversation between others in the house. She had
no toys or other objects with which to occupy her time.
In 1970 her mother escaped from the house, taking Genie with her. The condition of the girl came
to the notice of a social worker, and she was placed in the rehabilitation ward of a children’s

hospital. When she was first admitted to the hospital, she could not stand erect, run, jump or

climb, and was able to walk only in a shuffling, clumsy way. She was described by a psychiatrist
as ‘unsocialised, primitive, hardly human’. Once in a rehabilitation ward, however, Genie made
fairly rapid progress. She learned to eat quite normally, and tolerated being dressed like other
children. Yet she was silent almost all of the time and masturbated constantly, in public situations,
refusing to abandon the habit. Later she lived in the home of one of the doctors from the hospital
and gradually developed a fairly wide vocabulary. Yet her mastery of language never progressed
beyond that of a three or four year old.

50 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY