Hey Everyone! So, After Creating A Studyblr, I Have Found So Many Essay Writing Resources And Since Writing

An Overview of Note-Taking Styles

Note-taking is one of the most essential skills a student should master. It allows you to record and review information to be used in the future. But what’s the best way to do so? Here’s an overview of note-taking styles that can help you maximize your learning!

writing an essay in college is very different from writing an essay in high school. personally, i write more research/history papers than literary essays (the liberal arts life and curse), so this is going to be a post on how a general research-y essay that has a thesis and arguments. 

intro

don’t open with a quote and don’t be overly broad. 

avoid generalizations 

your intro should address the topic of your essay (ex. the significance of gardens in renaissance society), and then narrow down to what you want to talk about in regards to your topic (ex. the political influence of the Medici gardens during the renaissance)

thesis! it should include the argument you want to make about the narrowed down topic, and three (or however many your class requires) reasons to support it. I like to think of it as W = X + Y + Z. 

your thesis explains who, what and why in a concise manner. 

body

topic sentences should not be a word for word copy of your thesis.

the order of arguments in your thesis is the order of your paragraphs 

depending on the length of your essay, there should be at least two justifications to your argument. 

so, just as the intro has a formula, X = A + B, and so forth. 

A and B should be backed up with some sources/quotes. don’t forget that if you are quoting from class notes to put either the prof’s last name, or (class notes)

be sure to have clear and concise arguments, don’t be flowery

USE WORDS THAT ARE ACCURATE. thesaurus is great but if you use a word that sounds cool but doesn’t capture the meaning you want to convey then don’t use it, because it may just change the meaning of your argument

quote whatever isn’t yours. it is completely fine if 90% of your sentences are quotes. its weird to get used to, but don’t worry about it. 

conclusion

the worst part in my opinion. 

synthesize don’t summarize. show how your arguments relate back to the thesis.

try not to copy paste your thesis into the conclusion, word it so that the readers understands that through XYZ, you were able to conclude and support argument W (referring back to the thesis formula)

do not add any new information, do not add quotes. 

your final sentence should tie up the essay in a pretty bow, but try to avoid clichés 

protips

when writing the body paragraphs, your ‘weakest’ paragraph should be in the middle, strongest as your last, and the second best as your first.

if you’re stumped on the intro, skip it. write out the body first, then the intro and you’ll be able to concisely word your thesis

think of your essay as an infomercial. your intro is the loud and clear HERES MY PRODUCT, the body is blasting information on why the product is so cool, and the conclusion is the final push for the viewer to buy that product. make your teacher want to agree with your thesis! 

use a mix of paraphrase and quotes!

don’t forget your works cited lmao (the MLA Handbook is a gr8 tool, also OWL Purdue)

prime time for essay writing is in the morning or at night, but make sure you edit it meticulously 

EDIT ON PAPER NOT ON YOUR SCREEN

stay humble, study hard 

So I was back in Mandarin class and the teacher let us know that in ancient times sometimes they wouldn’t even give their girl children names. Their attitude was why bother getting attached to her when she’s just going to grow up and belong to someone else? She doesn’t need her own identity because she is the property of her future husband. If they needed to refer to a woman they would say that’s Wang’s wife. In the same way you would say oh, that’s Wang’s car or Wang’s house. Let’s remember that we give names to dogs, horses, ships and buildings but some human women don’t deserve such recognition. She also touched on sex-selective abortion for a bit and it was all in all a pretty sad discussion today.

I was really moved but it felt like everyone else didn’t care or thought that stuff doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen anymore. And yet even now women’s identities are being erased when they get married. Their personal history and family ties are untraceable because they are “adopted” into their husbands family. It’s disgusting and I hate that its so nomalized and I hate that even women’s names are not our own. We might as well never have been given names in the first place.

Sundays and synapses.

finished my infographic project for chem!

DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access-  Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this.  Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

Learning Medical Terminology

Source: Medical Terminology Made Incredibly Easy by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

dropbox containing linguistics textbooks

contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies

dropbox containing language textbooks

contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

dropbox containing books about language learning

includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb

if there’s a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!

hello! precalculus is a pretty interesting class if you put your mind to it, and i found some great resources for it so i thought i would share! also, since trigonometry is part of this subject, that’s included too!

khanacademy

purplemath

precalc dictionary!

math forum

mathbff

course notes

notes by topic

amazing formula sheet

sparknotes: math

edX course!!

math study tips

video lessons

ucl instructional videos

quadratic formula song

math professor quotes

+ trig specific

khanacademy!

course notes

how to learn trig

great formula sheet

interactive unit circle

trig identities hexagon

basic trig + graphing

identities and equations

unit circle song!

more masterposts!!

algebra

AP chemistry

AP world history

studyblr-ing

the Everything Book

the pomodoro method

how to use flashcards

how to use sticky notes

welcome to high school

tiny study spaces

what’s in a pencil case

i hope this was of help to you! keep shining like the star you are and remember to be awesome today!!

- Aza