Sotsu-ron support

Organizing your notes / backing up your work

Contents

1. Analogue or digital is your choice.

2. Suggestions for analogue notes.

3. Ideas vs quotes – in your sotsu-ron.

4. References – at the end of your sotsu-ron.

5. Back ups.

6. Questions?

Taking notes: Analogue or Digital?

During the writing of your SR, you will need to take notes.

You can choose to do this on paper, on a device, or some mix of both.

The key points are that the quality is high, the system is sustainable*, and you can find things again smoothly.

*in other words, you can keep up the quality for the whole of the project

Sotsu-ron needs good note-taking

Here is one way to organize analogue notes:

Page no.can be 101,

201, etc.

There are 2 styles for you to try

Top to bottom design

Original source & more ideas: davidseah.com

Inside your sotsu-ron (1)

You will need to separate your words / ideas from other people’s writing.

When you use someone else’s original thinking / original sentences, you need to show it comes fromthem, and not from you.

Inside your sotsu-ron (2)

When you use an idea you read somewhere, you need to show the writer’s family name and the year the writing was published.

Here is an example:

Scientists claim there is a strong similarity betweenphysics and goal-setting (Pang, 2020).

(These are my words, summarizing Pang’s idea. Her name, and the year of her book are in brackets).

Inside your sotsu-ron (3)

Sometimes we want to use the author’s actual words, for example, when they said somethingperfectly, when we can’t paraphrase it well, or when it is part of a definition.

“This is the dilemma of adulthood, when we’re constantly aware of two contradictory needs: to live in the moment and to plan for the future. The desire to do both at once eats away at the capacity to properly achieve either.” (Pang, 2020, p.126).

Inside your sotsu-ron (4)

“This is the dilemma of adulthood, when we’re constantly aware of two contradictory needs: to live in the moment and to plan for the future. The desire to do both at once eats away at the capacity to properly achieve either.” (Pang, 2020, p.126).

(These are Pang’s exact words. She not only expressed the idea really well, but it is also tricky to paraphrase. Because we are using her exact words, this time we use speech marks and a page number).

At the end of your sotsu-ron (1)

At the end of your sotsu-ron, you need a complete list of all the materials mentioned in your SR – books, papers, etc.

For a book, you need the author’s family name,initial, year, title, city the publisher is based in, andpublisher. The book title will be in italics.

At the end of your sotsu-ron (2)

For a paper, you need the author’s family name, initial, year, title, The journal’s name, volume, issue, and page numbers of the article.

For papers, the journal’s name is in italics.

(so this journal is called “Theory into Practice”, it is volume 16, edition 3, and the paper was on pages 200-206).

At the end of your sotsu-ron (3)

Making the list of references is an annoying job, so it is best to keep it updated as you write the SR.

The order is A – Z by family name for most* SRs.

*special cases might be if you do a SR that focuses on literature.

Backing up your work

You need to complete the SR to a high standard to graduate.

To be safe, you need to keep back ups of your work.It is best to have more than 1 way of doing this (forexample, USB + cloud).

As with note-taking, your system needs to besustainable. You should always be able to find your most recent version easily.

Questions?

We will talk in more detail in April about references, quotes, and technical things like that.

For now, you should focus on sustainable ways of note-taking and backing up your work.

The bottom line is that you are responsible for your notes, accurate references, and fully backed up work.

If you have any questions, mail or make an appointment to see me.