Essay help

[Maturestudentatthisage]

Hi

I am a mature student and I really need help on how to take notes and do research ie reading journals etc.

I started university this year and I’ve left an essay to the last minute (i know my fault, and i need to learn to not procrastinate). My essay is due Monday morning and I’m stuck with how to read journals and write notes. I’ve left it too late to ask for help from student learning so can anyone help me?

I have all these windows open on my laptop and I’m getting confused. How do I read a journal, I’ve been told to skim it, but that isn’t working for me, and I dont know how to take notes from journals/books I do read.

Im getting into a terrible state and would so appreciate some guidance.

thank you.

P.S. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.

Use your institution's library search and be simple with your search words. You should be able to skim the abstract without opening each journal. If it's relevant then delve into the article. You can google articles and use a similar technique, bookmark if you need to, this also helps when you need to check your referencing. If you're really tight for time skip to the conclusion as it summarises what they're saying. Hope this is some help.

How many words is your essay supposed to be? And what is your degree course? So if your essay has an 800 word count limit (not including foot notes and bibliography) you need to shoot for around 8 sources. Just a rule of thumb to get you started, some Unis/degrees require fewer and some require more.

As the pp said, read the abstracts to find the best most relevant sources. Were you given a question to answer in your essay? The most relevant ones will be the ones that provide information from which you can answer the question.

To take notes, you can highlight text and cut and paste into a Word document anything you think may be useful to cite or reference via paraphrasing when writing the essay. It’s best to do it with an in text citation - as simple as author surname, date of article and page number- ie [Cici 2024:45] after whatever you cut and paste as a note so that you can later properly footnote the text of your essay.

After you have made notes, you then assess what are these telling me? What answer do they support? Then you write an essay outline where you structure your answer to the essay question and then use your notes to support your points. This often requires shuffling notes around a bit (why it is good to have each one with its little in text citation tag- so you always know which source you got it from)

Your Uni Dept should have guidance on how you do the footnoting and bibliography- there are lots of different formats used and you need to know which one you are supposed to use.

Ok deep breath. You're looking for resources to allow you to talk about the essay question. So start by reading the abstracts and seeing if it sounds relevant to your essay. If it does, then read through the contents and headings. If it's a research paper, skip to the conclusions and discussion, what did they find and what did they learn from their study? If that also sounds relevant to your essay look at it in more depth, if not, move on to the next one. For the ones that look relevant, what research methods did they use, what was their sample size and demographic, where might you critique their approach.

Remember that 'relevant' doesn't always mean that it supports your position. If it's a discussion you might need to bring in articles which provide multiple sides of a conversation, so look for contradictions, failings, things that might challenge your position.

Be careful not to go down rabbit holes, especially since you're short of time. Also be organised. I kept a spreadsheet of papers I looked at for each essay, with notes on whether they were useful or not and links back to the paper. It came in very handy when I was doing referencing.

If you can tell us a bit more about the topic and requirements we might be able to help more?

It would help to know as a science v. humanities v. arts journal articles are very different.

Oh thank you so much. My course is social sciences and my word count is 3000. I’ve got a plan, but just need to know how to read journals and how to take notes.

We never did any of this stuff at school. I find it so hard to be critical, and find gaps in research etc.

Maybe university just isn’t for me 😞

3000 is a lot to do in 28hrs. Lesson learned from this is give yourself several days. Don’t worry too much, the first year of Uni the grades are usually pass/fail to give you a chance to learn the ropes before the grades really start to count.

The unmentioned gaps in research will usually be found in the methodology section or in any jumped to conclusions. Any gaps known to the researcher will be listed towards the end where authors talk about limitations of the study and areas for future research.

You should have an idea as to what methods are required for sound research? And how to assess whether the results support the conclusions?

Ok, social sciences - look at your title and decide what areas need to be explored to be able to answer the question.

Then search key words to get your journal articles. Most journal articles will tell you:
-What the subject is
-What the 'question' they are discussing is
-Key arguments in favour
-Key arguments about that
-What their conclusion is

Take notes - who said what? Why is it important? Where did they get their information?

Then you can use that to form your essay.

Example:
Should XL bully dogs be banned?

Introduction: XL bully dogs were first seen in the UK in xxxx year (source). They are not a specific breed but a 'type' of dog. They are characterised by x, y, z, features (source). In recent years, concerns have been raised about the high prevalence of attacks by XL bully dogs, often leading to fatalities (source).

Discussion: Blogs and blogs (2023) argue that they should be banned because they are known to be aggressive and the gene pool is small (source). Dog lover (2023) argues that you shouldn't blame the breed of a dog because all dogs are individual.

Some people say that the dogs are inherently vicious (source) whilst others say that how they are brought up is more important (source).

Conclusion: XL bully dogs should/should not be banned because x, y, z.

If you give any argument or fact, you should be able to say where you got that information. Look up your referencing system and do your references as you go - you'll be grateful that you did.

Here is an example from social sciences..

Researcher decides to figure out whether men and women are equally intelligent.

So he fills skulls with beans and then weighs the beans that fit in each skull.

His thought process was more beans=more brains=more intelligent.

Since men’s skulls on average hold more beans than women’s skulls, he concluded that men were indisputably more intelligent than women. And furthermore, according to his chart, that on average women had the intelligence of an average 12yr old boy.

What is the glaring problem with his research method and the conclusion arrived at? Can you see how his method drove him to a problematic conclusion? What assumption(s) caused him to choose a faulty method?

If you can spot this, you can spot other issues too.

After this essay, a good book that illustrates common science fails is “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre. It is an easy and humorous read that will teach you a lot on how to critically look at scientific publications- social science and otherwise.

www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/essay
This is an essay map tool very good for planning

notebooklm.google/
This is a fab tool which you can upload research articles and it will make a podcast out of them
There are also summeriser ais which are good

Type your assignment details into chat gpt and ask them for 3000 words including references.

Then sit back and hope that even in this day and age, the academics at your institution are still clueless enough about AI not to consider that anyone might do that...

Don't do this. It'll be very, very obvious that you did, and most especially if you haven't taken up (?) opportunities for feedback on your draft.
However, you can use chat GPT to help with reading. Copy and paste the text of the article and ask it to summarise the key points of the text. You say skim reading isn't working for you - try skim reading the original text after reading a summary. Your goal is to identify passages which can be cited in support of what you are saying in answer to the essay question. Once you have found them, paraphrase or quote those sections, and add your own commentary.

If you are still looking for sources, one tip is to look at the reference list / bibliography of one useful thing you have read, as an alternative to keyword searches. There will likely be some other similiar / related works cited there which would also be relevant to you.

Good luck, you're not the only one who's been here and it doesn't mean you're not cut out for university!

Thank you so much for all your input. We up until 2 am doing my essay so I have made some progress.

i would never use AI to write an essay. @newwnamme thank you for suggesting using chat GPT for articles which I am finding more difficult to understand, I never thought of that.

For a journal article I would firstly read the title and abstract to check it seems relevant. I would then read the introduction (it might help you to identify other relevant literature) and the first paragraph of the discussion. Generally the first paragraph of the discussion will have some sort of summary of the findings. This might be sufficient in itself but if not it will give you a good enough grasp of the paper to know if it is useful. Only then if it seems relevant would I tackle the method and the results to look for methodology flaws, evaluation points etc.

I'm a uni student currently studying in a different subject but nonetheless this is what I would suggest.
First plan your essay, title, what subject matter/s are you planning to talk about, get a rough idea of journals/readings you're going to relate to so you're no inundated with trawling through all readings. So basically only read what is going to be relevant to you in this essay.
In terms of note taking, I would skim read, pick out references/quotes that you can work with and pull what you can from what you've highlighted. It's a big essay, I would do essay outline first, then Starr breaking it down into sections but would be spending the day working on it today. I don't know if your uni will provide an extension? Good luck!

I’m obviously quoting myself here, and more making a statement about current practice than actually recommending this.

Dos everyone miss the bit where the Op says her essay is due tomorrow? It might be more useful to give advice on how to appeal a deadline and ask for extenuating circumstances to be considered.

Op, for next semester please ask for advice from student support services.