"What it says & What it does" method of note taking
This is a method of text analysis in which both the content of the text but also the structure of the argument/writing is analyzed.
Make two columns for your notes. Progress through an essay paragraph by paragraph. Noting in one column the central idea of the paragraph (or passage) and the other how the paragraph functions in relation to the essay as a whole.
For instance does the paragraph:
Work as an introduction to ideas which are to follow
Introduce a new idea/advance the argument
Expand, explain or complicate an already introduced idea
Offer historical information
Offer an example or examples
Restate previously stated ideas in different terms
Introduce a contrasting idea or example, perhaps by another thinker or artist
Summarize information (such as related theories) which is necessary for the reader to know in relation to the argument the author is advancing.
Offer analysis
Introduce key terms which express key ideas and define them (this is akin to adding new tools to the kit he/she is going to use in further the argument/discussion.)
Offers a parallel thought/example/narrative
Moves dialectically, introducing an idea, articulating a paradox or contradiction within the idea, suggesting a new reading of the original idea/artwork/theory/situation.
Offer conclusions or concluding statements
Summarize what has come before
For instance lets take the first five paragraphs of Clement Greenberg's Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html
| TEXT | What it says | What it Does |
| ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest -- what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted -- does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age? | Greenberg asks if the great disparity between high and low culture is a new phenomenon (in 1930's) | Begins with a range of cultural examples and uses them to pose a question (which the reader imagines will be central to the text.) |
| The answer involves more than an investigation in aesthetics. It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closely and with more originality than hitherto the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific -- not the generalized -- individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place. What is brought to light will answer, in addition to the question posed above, other and perhaps more important questions. | says that more originality and close analysis in relation to individual's social historical context is needed to answer the question above about the relation of high and low culture to individuals in the culture. | Announces the method the author will use in the text ("more than aesthetics") and the study of the specific individual and their historical context. |
| A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works. In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican architecture. | In times when meaning is unstable the arts have often taken refuge in a static academicism. The inference is that he is describing his own historical moment. | Introduces a new branch of the argument and puts it in historical context. Infers his own reading of contemporary culture in which "It becomes difficult to assume anything." |
| It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we -- some of us -- have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture. A superior consciousness of history -- more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism -- made this possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, "natural" condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part of the advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets, even if unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, therefore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically -- and geographically, too -- with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe. | Introduces the idea of "avant garde" as the opposite of academicism, defines it as being made possible by historical criticism which understands conditions of life as not "natural" but a "succession of social orders". Dates the emergence of the avant garde as the 1850's and 60's and relating to a development of "scientific revolutionary thought in Europe." |
Offers a counter narrative/an alternative possibility to the one advanced in the paragraph above. Uses the previous ideas as a negative on which to build an opposing perspective. Introduces a new idea, key term "Avant Garde culture" Gives a historical account of the 'birth' of avant garde culture |
| True, the first settlers of bohemia -- which was then identical with the avant-garde -- turned out soon to be demonstratively uninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the "bourgeois" in order to define what they were not. Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society. Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant-garde's emigration from bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown by the falling away of aristocratic patronage. (Ostensibly, at least, it meant this -- meant starving in a garret -- although, as we will be shown later, the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money.) | Early avant garde was less specifically political but influenced revolutionary 'milieu' of the times. To be avant garde also meant becoming potentially disenfranchised financially as the old patronage system had been replaced by a market one. |
Anticipates an argument against his statements above. Historicizes |