Double Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical Thinking

Jerz > Writing > Academic
    [ Argument | Title | Thesis | Blueprint | Pro/Con | Quoting | MLA Format ]

What is a double-entry research journal?

Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.

By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.

My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs. Drafting with their DEN journal open in another window helps my students focus on the college-level critical thinking that they know I want to assess. They are less likely to fall back on summary and other filler.

My example of a DEN table that presents thoughtful comments on three different quotes from a single source:

Create a separate table for each different source. 

Remember, your goal for the right cell is not to summarize the contents of the left cell.

What makes a good right-side analytical comment?

• Weak, surface-level engagement: “These statistics can help my claim that solar energy is overhyped.” (What I see here is a restatement of a paper topic. One short sentence doesn’t let me assess your college-level ability to engage with these statistics and make the claim you say you can make.)
• Better, but still preliminary: “I can probably use Smith’s analysis of the WTO reports from 2010 and 2020 to explore their claims about solar energy.” (The student is talking about an idea they might use in the future, but they haven’t engaged with this idea yet, so I don’t really have anything to evaluate. If you haven’t tried writing a paragraph that uses Smith’s analysis, I won’t be able to give you any feedback for improving your skill at writing such paragraphs.)
• Shows some engagement: “I really liked Smith’s article because I agreed with what she said about South American and she agrees that that solar energy is overrated. It was cool how she took the WTO prediction from 2010 and used it to critique how the WTO was bragging too much about its supposed progress in 2020.” (This is a personal reflection, which is fine for this brainstorming assignment, but these sentences are too informal and conversational to go into your actual draft.)
• Very strong, academic tone:  “Although Smith finds much to praise in South American progress in solar energy, she raises important concerns when she notes the discrepancy between the World Trade Organization’s 2010 prediction of a 25% increase in solar energy use over the next decade and the lavish praise the WTO gave out after reporting a much more modest 5% increase in 2020. By contrast, Jones concludes that…” (This makes an original connection between two credible sources.)