Some advice about taking notes on the King letter and about working with your group.

A student wrote with the following questions, and I thought my answer to her might help a few of you.  For asking the question--one which helps other students learn, the student who asked gets two points extra-credit on her final class grade. The student asked,

Dr.B, I need help...My group has picked 2C for our topic. So I have to re-read MLK's letter and explain the 5 most important things king has accomplish? How do I take these notes? I see you gave us some pointers on how to take notes but is it a certain software? Can I just take the notes how I want to do them? ...I am also going to try to get help from my group which sometimes is hard for me because we all have different times we do homework. 

My answer follows:

My advice is to set up a file in your favorite word processor, and use this file to take your notes.  You should be able to copy and paste the notes to your blog later.  You can also consider using the blog itself to take notes. Here, you would save your notes as a draft instead of publishing them right away as a post, and you can come back later to finish and post your notes to your blog.  You can use the "Edit Posts" link to use your blog in this way, and you'll see the link off the blogger dashboard, right next to the "New Post" button.  Just for information, you can also use "Edit Posts" to go back and edit or revise a post you have already made to the blog.

In terms of how to take the notes and what to look for: 

Read through the letter again.  The key questions you'll be thinking about are: "What is King trying to accomplish in this section of the letter, and what is it in the text which makes me think this is what he is trying to accomplish?" You'll be taking one or two notes for each section as you find answers to these questions. Your notes will be the answers to these key questions plus enough information about the section you are reading to describe it to your reader.   If you'll notice, these notes will then correspond to a point you could make later in a paper, saying something like, "In the section of the letter where King talks about X, he is attempting to accomplish Y.  You can tell he is trying to do Y, because if you look at ... you can see ..."

Don't get carried away here.  My guess is you'll end up with one or two pages max of notes on the various things the text lets you infer about what King is trying to accomplish.  As your research for the paper develops, and you read more about the context and what others say about what King is doing in the letter--you'll be doing some of this reading this coming week--you'll begin to be able to pick out what you think are the priorities in what King is  attempting to accomplish.  

Let me also offer a word or two of advice about working with your group.  Call rather than email, and try and get a list of times when it's OK to call and talk about what your group is doing.  You might consider setting up a calling tree, where you talk to a couple of people each week at a particular time, and they talk to one or two people at another time, filling each in on what is decided.  You can also consider setting up a short conference call or IM or texting session, that is, if you can identify a particular time for these sessions.

Get in touch if any of the above doesn't make sense or doesn't work.

Steve