The Researcher’s Notebook

The Researcher’s Notebook

There are several strategies to choose from to keep your research organized. Most of you are familiar with the notecard system--another system which is helpful is the researcher’s notebook. Remember, as with any part of the writing process, experiment and then choose what works for you.

Research Strategy Section

This may include the following:

Your working thesis and/or questions to be answered.
Deadlines and schedules
List of things to do
Places to find information
Sample Entries:

Go to Citrus College Library
Make an appointment with my professor to discuss paper
Get list of books for interlibrary loan--NOW!!

Reading Notes Section

This will include the following:

The bibliographic entry for each source.
Key quotations , summaries of the author’s thesis, paraphrases of important material, etc. from each source.
Your reactions to what you read. This is the most important part of this section.
Freewrite
Ask and answer questions a reading raises; critique the reading:

What do I think of this work?

Does this change my working thesis?

What assumptions does the author make?

Do I fully understand the argument here?

Working Hypothesis/Thesis Section

This is the most important part of the notebook. Here you create, revise your thesis and ideas, begin to answer the questions raised by your reading, posit points you would like your essay to cover, and THINK. This is the section which helps you keep your paper yours; you avoid the "information dump" paper if this is done properly.

As you may realize, your paper will be nearly done if you keep this notebook properly

SAMPLE PAGE FROM A RESEARCH NOTEBOOK

Clements, Arthur L. Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, and the Modern Period. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

3 In the Middle Ages and Renaissance "spiritual life and progress were frequently . . . charted by the stages of the Purgative Way, Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way or, more simply, Purgation, Illumination, and Union."

Can I find these stages in the Holy Sonnets? Check Gardner’s explanation

9 "(The word "object" is in quotation marks because in the mystical experience the usual division between subject and object appears unreal or merely conventional: subject and object, though mentally distinguishable, are experienced as actually one or at least as inextricable interconnected.)"

Although he is referring to "object" as the goal of contemplation, I wonder if this could not also be applied to object/subject in the poems. The two do become confused and often the poet is in the confusing position of treating himself as an "object" in his own poems.

***************

68 compares the concreteness of Donne’s love poetry with the Sonnets abstractions. Concludes that Donne was/is unable to write vividly and concretely about the "Vision of God" because of God’s transcendence

I disagree . . . I believe he is fearful of writing about the vision of God and the tension between concrete expression and "safer" abstraction is precisely what makes his "Vision of God" concrete and vivid in both a physical and a spiritual sense. He must afterall experience God w/in himself--both the most concrete physical experience and the most distant (i.e. how can you experience yourself as other?)

!!68-9 Makes the rather radical assertion that the love poems represent Donne’s "more religious" period and are later.

74 Sonnet 10: They do not move beyond purgation and therefore do not achieve unity (w/God) as it is achieved in the love poetry (w/love).

75 Sonnet 10: center on the remoteness of the divine

I have to agree that he is writing about an earlier state in a spiritual journey. The nature, however, of that journey w/ its potential blasphemous implications are what grips him w/ fear. This is a mature consideration of the implications of unity with God and the methods necessary to acheive it. Sonnet 10 could be a pulling away from the implications of Godlikeness realized in 7,8,and 9.

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