Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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different insights into a coherent argument, one for writing individual chapters, one for
integrating the chapters into a coherent overall argument, etc.
For example, you can use note cards and sticky notes if you insist, but why should
you? There are major advantages to taking notes (and writing yourself reminders) on the
computer. It’s much quicker to search your computer files than to look through note cards
by hand, and it’s much faster to cut and paste on the computer than to shuffle note cards.
You probably started using note cards in junior high school and they may have served
you well so far, but now is the time to switch to paperless information storage.
Remember, all your work has to go on a computer eventually, and every keystroke you
enter now is a one you don’t need to enter later. You can read a computer document
you’ve created more accurately than your handwriting so you don’t confuse a 5 and an S
(or a 0 and an O) in a call number, for example, and it will correct your spelling and
grammar as a bonus. You also get a better sense on a computer of how much you’ve
actually written.
Every year, several Western seniors lose a whole set of senior project files that
represent days if not weeks of work because their hard drive crashes. There’s no need for
this. Get in the habit of saving the file whenever you pause in your writing. Before you
leave your computer, always save your work to your universal disk space on Miami’s
server. UDS is backed up on tape once a day, so you cannot permanently lose your files.
You can pay a terrible price for carelessness when you don’t back up your work and it
doesn’t take long to do it, so treat backing up like a seat belt and “click it or ticket it.” If
the Internet is a distraction for you, disconnect it when you are supposed to work on your
project, but always reconnect before you leave your computer so you can save your work
to UDS.
Carry a small notebook or a mini tape recorder with you at all times, so you can
capture epiphanies whenever they occur. Your hands will be covered with ink if you try
to write all your notes to yourself on them.
What makes a senior project of this magnitude feasible in two semesters is that
the human mind retains all kinds of contextual information that is not processed at a
conscious level. When you look through books to compile your annotated bibliography,
you will be instructed not to read them. Instead you will focus on answering a few simple
questions about the book—its topic, its distinctive angle or approach, its relevance to
your topic, and the author’s perspective. One might naively think that’s all you would
remember about the book but, as long as your conscious mind is really focused on the
task at hand, you will retain an enormous amount of other information at the unconscious
level just from skimming over the pages. You don’t think you’re paying any attention to
that information but you really do unconsciously. When you come to do the literature
review you actually know more about the book than you would expect. That effect is
intensified when you do a closer skimming of the book for the literature review. By the
time you come to actually read portions of the book to write a chapter, you’ll feel as
though you’ve practically read the book already—you’ll have a pretty good idea what the
argument is before you start reading. Moreover, you will have a much better sense of the
intellectual context in which the book was written because you have skimmed through a
bunch of other books on the same topic. As a result, when you come to write, you can
draw on many more books than if you were encountering each one for the first time.
Naturally, that unconscious understanding will be wrong once in a while —you thought