 In the fullness of time, each of you should find your own way of doing things. This presentation is based on what I think works, both in terms of how I was trained and in terms of how I work. But I think there's always a million right answers in terms of how to get things done. So allow yourself to explore what works in terms of your own practice. But if you are ever frustrated, then it's worth trying things my way. So the first thing I would say is something called active reading, which is to say you need to participate in reading and not just sort of set your mind, don't just set your eyes on each of the words and say, oh, well, that's it. I read this thing. And my goal in terms of also, I'm talking about note-taking, other people talk about different things. But my goal overall is to try and break down the barrier between reading and writing. Because it's oftentimes the case that if you have to write something, you feel stressed out about you're like, oh, what am I going to write? What do I have to say? How should I organize things? But if you never experience subjectively that now I'm starting to write because you're so perfectly broken down the difference between reading and writing, then you never have writer's block and you never have the stress of not knowing what to write. So that's our goal is to break down the barrier between reading and writing. OK. So one thing, then, is to write as you read. And I suggest doing that with a pen or a pencil, yeah, on the page you're actually reading as you read it. And then to also take notes on the, I wasn't quite sure what word to use, but the first few pages of a book that don't actually say anything, like the copyright page, the title page, maybe there's some blank pages at the beginning. So take notes there so that you can look at the, I'm assuming we're talking about a book, but it could be an article, in terms of an article, it would be like usually there's a lot of space on the first page. You can take notes there that are your own sort of index to your own notes. So if you're reading and then you write something that you think is really brilliant or you find a passage that you think is really exciting, and in particular that you'll have to refer back to later, maybe, then write a note at the very beginning of the document saying what page your particularly insightful note is. So in the way the book itself has a table of contents, you have a table of contents to your own experience of reading the book. Yeah, that's a suggestion. And then similarly, you might in the course of reading something say like, oh, this document that this person refers to looks interesting. And you might, you would note that in the place that it comes up. But you would also note it in the bibliography, because let's say I learned this one the hard way, which is that I was like, oh gosh, there's some book about this that I really want to read. I should look up the citation. And then I had to find where in the book that thing was referred to to find my note about it. So I think it's just a helpful belt and braces safety measure to also put a little mark in the bibliography by the things that you think look interesting. And you can do that by just glancing through the bibliography and say like, oh, what here looks interesting. But you have more information to decide what's interesting when you see how the author you're reading uses that citation in the actual argument. So maybe something has a great title, but the person is actually really stupid. And you don't know until you try and read it. But in case I'm just saying, as you read, you will see how something's used in an argument. And then you can put a note there. But you can also put a note in the bibliography. OK, so now just some examples. Oh, let me see. Oh, yeah, right. And then I'm just anticipating the fact that you all might be saying, hey, look, buddy, I can't write in books because I'm getting the books from the library. And I think, OK, well, I'm not encouraging you to write in library books. Actually, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this, but if you're totally sure you will one day be really famous, then it's probably good to write in a library book because people who have written in library books, who would later go on to be famous, the university is actually kind of happy about that somehow. But I think you shouldn't be that arrogant. So don't write in library books, yeah. But then what do you do? All this advice I'm giving you doesn't apply. Well, what I do is I take notes on a vertically folded piece of paper that I sneak inside the book, right? So I take a piece of paper like this. Sorry, because of the Zoom filter. Vapors disappear, but there we go. Vertically folded piece of paper. And then you can sort of write on it and then stick it in the book. Now, trouble there is when you're done reading the book, you have like two, three vertically folded piece of paper that you have to do something with, right? And I oftentimes have a bunch of those things are lying around the house. And that's fine for a kind of one-off project because you'll probably use them, right? But one reason why it's nicer to have the books is that then it's there forever, right? Like five years from now, you can say, gosh, where did I read that? And then you can see your notes, right? Whereas if you had just have vertically folded piece of paper, you can't do that, right? But anyhow, can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But vertically folded piece of paper is how you get around things if you can't write in the library book, OK? So then I just thought I would sort of prove that this is how I do things. So this is a book I have read recently about the history of land use in the Qing Dynasty. And here's just a more or less randomly chosen page where you see I've written all over it, yeah? And then in the bibliography, I've noted things that I thought looked interesting. And then this is the kind of sort of like the title page. It has the blurb about the author and whatnot. So as I read, I took notes on that page as an index to the notes that I had taken in the page. And because I'm a sick person, this is actually what I do for fun, yeah? Like I didn't read this book because it's in any particular way useful for my research or whatnot. It's just a book that looked interesting. And this is how I read it. So I feel embarrassed about just sounding like a dinosaur, like, oh, don't use any computer tools. Don't use anything. So I'm going to pretend that this is not just some sort of aesthetic decision on my part because I'm an old man, but instead say, I think that, so you can have other mediated experiences of reading like on an iPad, for example. Yeah, that's no problem. But I think that writing by hand is really important, sort of biologically almost. That when you write by hand, you're writing slower than if you type. And that's important because then it gives you sort of time to think as you're writing. And I just, I don't know. I'm a big believer in, of course, we all write mostly on keyboards and on phones and things. And that's fine. But I think when reading, it's important to write in a way that actually sort of violates the text you're interacting with. And you can only really do that writing by hand. And I think it's just good psychologically. OK, so now that was active reading. Now adversarial reading, which is the kind of way of doing your active reading, which is, you should always try to disagree with what you're reading. And I think this is something that doesn't come naturally. Students, I think because of how high schools teach, where if your high school physics book says, I don't know, that force is mass times velocity or something, you are not encouraged to say, oh, yeah, prove it, you know. But that's how you should, at least in humanities, that's how you should approach things, right? Always assume that, I don't know, not that the person is wrong, but that there is no benefit of the doubt to the author. So in doing that, what does it mean? It means you should be looking for places where the author's logic doesn't make sense constantly, right? You should be sort of reading. As you read a paragraph, you say, ah, that doesn't make sense. That was not a warranted leap. And then you ask yourself always, can the evidence that the author has presented be used to argue the opposite point? Yeah? I think it's, I don't know, surprisingly often that this is the case, yeah? So someone says, oh, for example, here's a case where this happened. You think to yourself, ah, if I just assume that whatever the author's argument clearly is, I want to prove the opposite. Could I use this same evidence to prove the opposite? And then, OK. And then sort of similarly, but can you think about how the same evidence could be explained a different way? And I'm just saying kind of, for example, with a different methodology or from a different ideological perspective, yeah? So I think there's a useful way of sort of understanding authors is someone's a historian or someone's a sociologist or something. So they have certain methodological approaches. And they will have their own ideological perspective. The argument in this book I was reading, that I showed you examples of before, is that kind of broadly speaking, that Confucian values are part of why capitalism didn't develop in China. But very specifically, because that's a really sort of a really silly opinion to have, right? In terms of its essentialist idea. So instead, he actually had this much more sort of detailed argument about like Confucianism led to certain kinds of social structures. And those social structures led to certain kind of land use regimes. And then those land use regimes led to the failure of capitalism to develop. But you might say, I don't know, that oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's an example. He clearly had some sort of thought it was really important to explain everything in terms of rational choice theory, where like each individual historical actor is always doing what's good for his own economic self-interest in a very sort of American neoliberal way. And that was because he was coming from the social sciences, which tends to be how they do these things. So I think that's the sort of thing I'm saying. It's just when he's saying like, oh, look, in this court case, this happened, it's important to understand his positionality as someone who's using a certain methodology and a certain ideology. Yeah, so remember that the purpose of research is to challenge and to expand, receive wisdom, not to reproduce it. So you're always looking for, you should always be aggressive and adversarial in your approach to existing scholarship, because it's by finding holes in evidence or places where a conclusion has been made with insufficient evidence or with faulty logic that you can contribute to the kind of social enterprise of scholarship. And actually one thing that I also notice with students is that they tend to think, well, look, I don't know. Here I'm reading this person who spent 20 years working on this kind of thing. And I'm reading this other person who's very knowledgeable and has read all this stuff. And who am I to form an opinion here? But I think that's totally the wrong way of thinking. Instead, think of books and articles as kind of free floating in the sense that maybe someone had better evidence. Maybe someone is a really smart person, but they've just failed to write a good article. So it's still perfectly valid for you to say I didn't find this piece of logic convincing. And then in terms of finding your own ideas, the best thing to do is find authors who disagree with each other. Because by kind of bringing together authors who disagree with each other, you are in the perfect position to kind of adjudicate where you say, well, this one had used this evidence, and this one used this evidence, this one used this logic, and this one used this other logic. And here's me as a reader. Here's where I think each of them have failings. And let's say, in a sense, the easy way to work in this way is then you sort of are the judge of who's right in some debate. But of course, actually, that's kind of lazy in terms of it's not an overall judgment that matters. It's like, oh, it turns out author A is better than author B. No, it's the judgment and the details that matters. OK, so that was it in terms of actually how to take notes. So active reading, which is different places. I think you should be writing basically down as you read things. And then adversarial reading, which is the kind of posture you should take vis-a-vis the thing you're reading, which is disagreeable. That's it in terms of how you actually take notes. But now you have a bunch of notes, right? So what do you do with them? So you should gather them together. And I like to think about Wittgenstein and then on the slide, I've said the great Irish philosopher as a joke because he was Austrian or English. But he did work in Ireland for a couple important, actually like seasons. And he died in Ireland, died in Dublin. But he had a little tiny hut on the west coast of Ireland where he went to kind of be away from everyone. And it's always been one of my dreams to emulate that. But I guess that's not the point. The point is, how did he work? So he had a little notebook that he kept on him. This is particularly actually when he was in Ireland, but whatever. He kept on him and he would go on walks. And then he would just sort of ruminate on his walks thinking about, because he's a philosopher, right? So he didn't need to read books to do research. He just thought, yeah? So he would go on these long walks and then he would just take little notes into his little notebook that he could sort of fit into his pocket while he was on his long walk. So that was sort of an analogous to what I'm suggesting for you would be taking notes as you read. And then after he sort of filled these little notebooks with just little fragments, he would copy the good ideas out in a more complete, more worked out way into a medium-sized notebook. And he'd do that back at home. So maybe his little notebook had, I don't know, nonsense in it, like how much he paid for a sandwich or something. So then he thinks, well, I'm not going to put that in my medium-sized notebook because I'm a philosopher, so I have to put the philosophy in the medium-sized notebook. And then one thing that I can vouch for in terms of my own experience is if you do this, you kind of cannot, you shouldn't, but you also can't, I don't think physically, write exactly the same thing into the medium-sized notebook as you do in a small notebook because it's too boring to do that. So your mind naturally expands, rewrites, reformulates whatever the idea is in a way that's useful. That's why he did it, right? So then he had these medium-sized notebooks. And then you guessed it, once he sort of filled up some medium-sized notebooks, he would have a big notebook. And into the big notebook would go complete paragraphs of sort of dun-ish philosophy. And if you know about, I don't know, if you're a Wittgenstein fan, you'll know that his books are called The Brown Notebook. And that's because that was the big notebook that was brown that he put a set of ideas in. And then there was another one, like the blue notebook. And they're called that, in part, because he only published one book in his life. So all these notebooks were never published. They were published after he died. Don't model yourself too closely on Wittgenstein, or you will never finish anything. But I do think there's a certain wisdom, which is to say, what I do suggest is copying notes by hand can be helpful before typing them up into a computer, which is to say, almost think about how awkward it would be if you had a book, I have a book. And then I'm flipping through the book, looking at my notes and trying to type in the computer at the same time. It's not going to work. So instead, I think it's good to have a blank sheet of paper and then look through your notes, especially starting with the beginning of the book you've read. And then you can sort of write out longer ideas or passages you might want to quote or something like that on the blank sheet of paper. And then when you actually go to type, go from the sheet of paper rather than from the actual book. And partly that's because I think it's physically more convenient. But I also think you will naturally formulate better, more mature ideas when you copy your notes in the way that Wittgenstein worked. Yeah, so let's say sort of light Wittgensteinian methodology here. I don't think you should go on long walks with tiny notebooks and then copy them into medium sized notebooks and then copy those into large sized notebooks and then die. But what I do think is that just tell yourself sort of that when it's not clear to you whether you should do something by hand or on the computer, just err a little bit on the side of copying out by hand because I think that has a lot to recommend it. OK. And that one thing is that ensures that you have more, your ideas that go into your computer are more yours. That's the point that I wanted to make there. It's like I see a lot of people take notes into a computer that are just sort of summarizing the argument of books. And that seems like I don't know, it might be good if you're trying to sell your notes to people who don't want to do the reading or something like that. But it's kind of a waste of your time. Like the point is when you actually go to write something, you want it to be yours. So rather than just sort of take notes into the computer that summarize what it is you've been reading, you want to keep things away from the computer for a while until you've sort of taken ownership of them and they've been mediated by your own ideas and then write your own ideas into the computer. There is a risk in following my advice, which is that you will lose track of what's yours and what's the idea of the original author. And if you do that too much, then you will commit plagiarism. And that's why the next hour is about what is plagiarism, how to avoid plagiarism and whatnot. And so I think that there's a natural tension there, which is you have to, at the moment of turning in an assignment, you have to be totally sure that the exact words being used are either in quotes and credited to whoever said them or that they're an invention of your own. But you can create processes to safeguard against plagiarism, like always giving track of the page number that you take something from. But you can also kind of do a certain amount of ex post facto checking, like if you are reading something and think like, wait, maybe that's a sentence that I actually copied from the book and have now lost track of where I got it from. You can find it and you can check whether it's exactly what the person said or not. But I guess I won't say anything more about that because that's Peter's job to help you avoid plagiarism. But I just want to say that I think that almost if you're not experiencing a small risk of committing plagiarism, then you're not doing enough integration of the ideas into your own mind. Like don't be so scared of plagiarism that you just sort of mechanically repeat things and put them nicely in quotes and paraphrase them or not. You have to somehow take ownership of things and ingest them and then create something new. And I think that if you follow my advice, that will happen naturally. So now add to computer. So remember that what you write is private until you decide to share it with someone else. So that means that your sort of sense of potential social anxiety can be you can have that totally gone. While you're writing an essay, you can fill it with swear words if you want. You can write about how boring it is to be doing the assignment, yet no one will know. So just feel totally free to write whatever you want and then get something out on the paper. The way I think of it is that the real art of writing is actually editing, which is like being a sculptor. But a sculptor needs a big chunk of ugly rock. And then the sculptor takes the big chunk of ugly rock and works it away into some fine, beautiful thing. But when you are writing, you start from nothing. You start from a blank sheet of paper. So your first goal is to make a big, ugly hunk of rock. And that's where you should feel totally free, totally unjudgmental of yourself and do whatever happens. Almost stream of consciousness. If you feel nervous, have a drink. Just get something out on the page. And then you can polish the writing and organization later. And I'll tell you, this isn't necessarily advice. But in my experience, I usually write about twice the length of the thing I'm aiming for. So if I'm aiming for a 10-page article, I write 20 pages. And then hone that down. And then just again about myself, this process of writing and editing, for me, for a published paper, usually goes through about 10 or 20 different versions. So I think that probably you're not planning to publish your MA dissertations. So probably you can have it be less than that. Also, you probably don't have the time for 20 different versions. But I'm just saying don't worry about thinking like, oh, I have to write this and finish the draft. Instead, just think of it as a very organic, iterative process. But in order to do that, you have to start early and chip away at it. Because if you only have two days left, then you're in trouble. Some of the techniques that people use a lot of the time, like notes that really summarize readings and writing outlines of your argument and then filling those outlines in, I think those are the sorts of techniques that have been developed because of time pressure. And then I think, well, if you have the time, you can follow my method. But because I think it's easy, or I'm trying to convince you that the way I do things is easy in terms of if you break down this difference between reading and writing as much as possible and you have this very free, liberated approach to writing where you're not judging yourself and you allow yourself to write swear words or nonsense, it's easy. But that sort of easiness of the experience is the downside of it, it's time consuming. So you have to allow the time for it. So the other thing I would say is in the actual process of writing, also, you should not always be at the computer. And partly, this is just a mental health thing. You're all spending too much time in front of a computer anyhow. But I even mean not in the coronavirus time. Don't spend too much time in front of your computer. And I'll just tell you the way I work is, so I write at the computer for a couple hours and I feel uncomfortable or bored or whatever. And then I print out what I've written and then I read what I've printed out in a different place. I think that's really important because just like, you'll get sick of being in the same room and you need to sort of almost like wearing a different hat. And you say, now I'm an author, now I'm an editor. So that might be like, I'm an author in my bedroom and I'm an editor in the living room. But I think that difference of location is really important. In the past, what I most like to do is do the reading of my own writing in a cafe around the corner. And the reason I like to do that is to just get a little fresh air and whatnot, but also to feel the social pressure to not fall asleep. If I just sort of lay down on the floor and fall asleep or something, I can't do that in a cafe. It would be socially unacceptable. So that little, and if you were reading something and writing on it in a cafe and you have a cup of coffee whatnot, you can sort of feel like you're being a sort of glamorous urban night. And maybe the other people around who are whatever trying to publish their novels or whatever, they all say, ooh, I wonder what he's writing. Yeah, anyhow, I find that little bit of social anxiety helpful in that editing process. So I like to do that in a cafe, but at least in the living room. And then you have to treat yourself in exactly the way you would treat another author. So experience alienation once you've written something. Once you've written something and printed it out, it's not yours anymore, it exists in the world and should be approached mentally just like anything else, which means you should read it actively and you should read it adversarily. You should say, in my case, who is this Nathan character who's written this utter garbage, all these swear words and this nonsense, yeah. And then you write on it and it's across things out and you say, this is bad logic and this is bad evidence and just be as mean as possible to yourself as an editor. And then I think that for me at least, but this is also how I was taught back in school, that that difference, that sort of split personality, I'm the author and I'm so gentle and easy on myself and feel so free and creative in front of the computer. And then I'm an editor and I'm small-minded and arrogant and judgmental and impatient and not in front of the computer. I think that separation and then bouncing between those two is an extremely productive sort of way of working. And then when you return to the computer, you have that advice that you gave yourself and you can incorporate it, you can do this even if you're not feeling creative, right? Like if you're sleepy, if you're bored, you can listen to music, you can even maybe like listen to something with content like the radio or something and just follow the advice of the former you, yeah. Who says, use this word here, put a comment here, improve, put a citation here. You can just sort of be obedient to your editor and then that's a way of squeezing work out of you when you're not feeling very creative. Now, the trouble is that editor might have big comments, might say like, you should read this book or might say, give another example or something like that. And then for those things, you need to be back in that author mode where you're free and you're creative and you have a certain amount of energy, right? So, I don't know, so it depends on what you're doing there, but I'll say in my experience, then I have to sort of take a measure of my own energy level. And if I don't have high energy, then I can fix the bibliography, I can add some commas, I can do some sort of small edits that need to happen. So, it's a good use of time to do them even when you have low energy. If I have higher energy, I go straight for those bigger recommendations that the editor me made. But then how do you keep track of it? Which is to say like, what if I'm sort of low enough energy that I'm doing the small things and then I run into a piece of advice that I gave myself and I'm like, I just don't have it in me today to do that. Personally, what I do is then I write a comment in all caps so that then I later can kind of just scan through the document really quickly and see where I've said in all caps what to do. And then your sort of low energy self can kind of put these all caps demands on a future higher energy self. And then this whole process, you just repeat again and again. So, you know, this is how I work. Yeah, I write in this very free, liberated way. Then I print out the nonsense that I've written. Then I read it in a very critical way. Then I try to follow the advice that that critical editor has given me to some extent mechanically and to some extent in a way that requires that free creative energy. And I'll say actually that that's a place where it's important to kind of remind yourself of the advice, you know, because let's say I do experience writer's block. I do experience anxiety about writing. And it's at that moment where I'm like, partly just following the advice of my own edits and partly having to be creative. And then when I noticed myself experiencing those negative feelings, I say, okay, then the problem is I have to decide, am I revising in a kind of mechanical way or am I writing new material in a kind of free way? And then, you know, and then you can get through the sort of blockage in that way. You just decide what's my energy level? What kind of mood am I in? Which of these two activities am I gonna do? Anyhow, so then through that process of repetition at some point, you know, you have a brilliant, logical, well-organized piece of writing that is, you know, well researched and full of original brilliant ideas, yeah. So, and you can, you know, as long as you leave yourself in the time, you can let that be a sort of, you can let the document almost tell you what your argument is and tell you how to organize itself and whatnot. Although actually, you know, let's say, other people will be giving you advice that I hope pulls in a slightly different direction because, you know, certain patterns of organization are quite standard and you should be aware of those and whatnot, but I do think that this sort of organic approach is a way to kind of let yourself be led by the process rather than trying to sort of dictate it in advance. Yeah, you know, you can imagine the sort of different marks that dissertation gets, right? 70 is the cutoff for a first because 70 is already a first. This is in the UK system. No one ever gives, it's like a 90, right? Cause what's the point? Because it's already an honor, yeah. But what those higher numbers are used for is to tell a student like, this is so good, you should publish it. That's how it works in my experience so far. And I would say that it's, you know, I don't know. I've seen that two or three times in my 10 years. Let's totally find a cherry pick. There's no way you'll read everything that's ever been written on something. Start with what's ever easiest. You somehow became aware of that topic. So start there and then you read things and then you see what they cite and then you read. It's easy. They're sort of reading backwards in time is easy, right? Because you can just read what other people cite, yeah? Then what you do find yourself, what can be hard is like, how do you know if someone has, you know, recently published something that the people you're reading haven't read that's super relevant and exciting. And that used to really be a problem, but now it's not because we have Google Scholar and Google Scholar will tell you. If something's been cited in the past, it doesn't mean it's good, but it means it's worth considering because it's sort of part of the story of how the discipline has unfolded. Whereas if something was published last week by a crackpot, you know, maybe you shouldn't waste your time with it, but that's something you can judge yourself. Citing things not in English, you know, in this case, probably in Chinese is a nice way of looking like a smarty pants, yeah? But I like to do that in as many languages as possible, maybe because I'm a linguist, but maybe because I want to look like a smarty pants. And it's easy to do now because of things like Google Translate and OCR and whatnot, yeah. Yeah, this wasn't in the PowerPoint and maybe I should, you know, turn off the film, but I'll tell you, in terms of finding things, okay, so there are two senses in which you can find something. One is you have to know of its existence, right? So if you know of its existence, you know, a bibliography of something you've already read is a good place or something like Google Scholar, yeah? Yeah. But once you know of something's existence, how do you actually get your hands on it? So most things now have a DOI associated with them, right? Digital Object Identifier. And so you can find yourself to your way to any kind of, let's say to the publisher's homepage, right? So you're on some journal homepage or whatnot, and then you'll see, oh, here's an article and then there'll be a DOI. Now, what you should tell you to do is then you check whether, you know, Trinity subscribes to that journal or you look in some Trinity database or something like that. But actually it's much faster if you go to something called Psy Hub, which is a illegal Russian site, yeah? And you can just Google like, it moves around, but it always has a simple address, like it's Psy, SCI, hyphen, hub, and then dot something, dot SE or dot SI or dot TW, yeah. But you can always, if you wanna know, you just Google something like, where is Psy Hub? And then the internet will tell you where Psy Hub is. And they have about 95% of all articles, you know, disciplines. And I find it's just so much faster. Oh, and it's just a search box and you just plop the DOI, just the DOI number, yeah. Okay, so I found the title of some article somewhere. That's, we will leave a mystery. So I put that into Google and then I see it here at its publisher's homepage, right? And then I say, oh, look, this nice article. Oh, here's the DOI, okay. So then I copy back to the N and then, and then, and there's Psy Hub, yeah. And then I just drop that number in there and the article comes right up, right? There it is. So that is just so fast and easy. So for books, there's another site called library Genesis. So we say library Genesis, and then we go here, for example. Okay, and then here I'll just say the Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese. I'm trying to get my own book here. Oh, and then see, well, here it has it, yeah. So there it is, historical phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, Chinese, and then you go over to all these little mirrors and then I usually choose the second one for whatever reason and then I, and then here we go and then you hit get and then you will download that book, yeah. So Psy Hub for articles and library Genesis for books, the issue though is that library Genesis isn't nearly as good as Psy Hub. So Psy Hub really has like 95% of all articles ever published anywhere, whereas library Genesis like only really has books in English and it only really has books in English published since like the mid 90s or later. And then I should say, you know, if any of this is illegal in your jurisdiction then don't do it, yeah.