If you plan on writing anything of length, it pays to be organized. In writing a draft of an article, you’ll be incorporating the existing literature, theory, and your own original analysis. You’ll be reading a lot, and you’re going to have to catalogue that reading somehow.
Good note taking is essential if you are to keep your thoughts organized and be able to quickly retrieve information. Of course, when you are taking notes on complex literature (and a lot of it), you’re bound to have many, many, many pages of notes. One aspect of note taking that I always found particularly frustrating was the difficulty in reviewing multiple sources at once. Sure, I took notes, but notes for each respective piece of literature were always stored in different documents, files, etc. A good literature review puts secondary sources in dialogue with one another, but when we have all our notes in separate places, we are visually creating separation between sources – making the job of comparison that much harder.
One way to keep similar sources in the same place is to create a flowchart where you note your sources’ similarities in themes and conclusions. For instance, suppose you are writing an article on post-Civil Rights Era social movements. You might have a collection of literature arguing that movement strategies have fundamentally changed, and another collection arguing the opposite. The first page of your flowchart would include all of the “movement strategies have changed” articles, with titles listed down the far left column. Your second column would answer the “Why” question: “why have movement strategies changed?” and then briefly list each article’s answer. A third column would provide an account of how the authors reached their conclusions. In a fourth column, indicate if you find the argument persuasive. By doing this, you’ll be able to quickly identify the points of convergence and divergence across a series of pieces of literature. Here is an example:
Essentially, this note taking strategy has two main benefits. First, it pushes you to identify themes in the literature. Second, it keeps the literature organized. This note taking strategy isn’t only useful for course papers or articles. You can also use it to prepare for your comprehensive exams, dissertations, or even collaborative projects where you can edit the document with co-authors. Keep your flowchart handy while reading and you’ll become more efficient in writing manuscript drafts.