Guide to the Study of Early Modern European History For Students ...

It does not really matter all that much how extensive your notes are, nor does it
matter all that much whether your notes are pencilled in the margins of books and articles
you own, or written out inside the back cover, or on separate sheets of paper, or in
notebooks, or in word documents on your computer. What does matter is that you have
made them, that you have actively participated in your reading. It is not enough to highlight or
underline important passages. Underlining is like xeroxing: you know that the text is
important, because otherwise you would not have xeroxed it. But you do not know why it is
important, because you don't know what it says. Taking notes forces you to understand what
you read and to decide what is important. Copying the most important passages verbatim
can be useful (especially if you want to refer to them in footnotes in your future work). But
the best notes do not repeat what you read; they state in your own words what you think about
what you read.
Whatever else you do, make sure that your notes distinguish precisely and consistently
between verbatim quotations (I use quotation marks for verbatim quotations, and only for
verbatim quotations), paraphrases of what you have read (no quotation marks, ever), and
your own random observations or ideas about the material you're reading [I put those in
square brackets]. If you don't make these distinctions clearly and consistently, you will
sooner or later confuse a verbatim quotation from somebody else's book with your own
ideas. Soon after that you will be charged with plagiarism. Or else you will confuse your own
ideas with something you found in primary sources. Soon after that you will be charged with
fabricating evidence.
I like to take notes in longhand and keep them in the chronological order in which I
have written them. I find that doing it that way lodges the content of my notes most firmly
in my mind and makes it easy to track down the notes I took when I need to. If your
memory works like mine, that will work for you as well. Your memory may of course work
quite differently. Many students prefer to type notes on the computer, because you can
search them and reorganize them without relying on your memory. You can also type faster
than you can write by hand (without a lot of practice). In my experience, you never
remember such notes as well as those which you wrote by hand, and you tend to change
them or move them around in ways that makes it very difficult to find them—unless you
make duplicates, in which case you can't keep track of the differences between the original
and the duplicate. After many years of experimenting, I have returned to the simplest
method of all: 150-page spiral notebooks, with notes, observations, and drafts in the
chronological order in which they were written, identified by type and date of writing, with a
little index on the last page of the notebook to indicate what's to be found on which pages.
Third, keep a bibliography. You no longer need to use three-by-five index cards,
as I did when I started out. You can use database management software specifically designed
for the purpose of maintaining bibliographic records and creating uniformly styled
bibliographic references in notes or bibliographies to be appended to papers and books. I
use Endnote, but there are other programs on the market. But whatever method you prefer,
do make it a regular habit to create a bibliographic entry for every book and article you come
across of which you think you might want to read it at some time in the future, perhaps by
downloading it directly from the web.
Chances are that you will never read the books and articles that you recorded in your
bibliography. You cannot read everything in which you are interested. And as time goes on
you will discover that the more books and articles you do read, the more quickly the number
of books and articles that you would like to read but can't increases. But you can keep a
record. You can build up a bibliography of items in which you are interested. And you can
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