You must have javascript enabled to view this website. Please change your browser preferences to enable javascript, and reload this page.
Writing is an important aspect of learning. As you listen to a lecture, or read a section of your textbook, you'll find that taking notes will not only help you remember the information later, it will also help you process the information as you hear or read it. Taking notes requires the ability to listen for the main idea or find it in a piece of writing, and summarize it briefly. The key is briefly. It can be counterproductive to try and take down every word the professor says in a lecture, or to copy a complete sentence describing a concept or an idea. Instead, use phrases that contain the key idea and a brief description of its meaning.
In the following exercise, practice summarizing each idea listed by writing a short description of it in the space that is provided. Try to keep each note to about ten words. Use abbreviations that you know and will remember when reviewing the material later.
Supervisory managers, who spend much of their time dealing with operative workers, must be strong in technical and human relations skills.
Source: Boone, Louis E.; Kurtz, David L.; and Knowles, Ronald A. Business. 1st Canadian ed. Toronto: Dryden, 1998. 174.
Another benefit of outsourcing is that it gives the firm the ability to negotiate the best price from among competing bidders and to avoid the long-term human resource costs associated with in-house operations.
Source: Boone, Louis E.; Kurtz, David L.; and Knowles, Ronald A. Business. 1st Canadian ed. Toronto: Dryden, 1998. 171.
A study of 112 countries by Susan Peterson, a political scientist at the College of William and Mary, and Stephen Shellman, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, found that countries with severe AIDS epidemics had correspondingly high levels of human-rights abuse and civil conflict.
Source: Faris, Stephen. "Containment Strategy." Atlantic Monthly 298.5 (Dec 2006): 34. (slightly abridged)
Even in countries that don't collapse, AIDS deaths can threaten security in the form of AIDS orphans, who are desperate, disenfranchised, and vulnerable to radicalization.
In contrast to some other social sciences, notably anthropology and geography, sociology's interest in the environment is of relatively recent vintage, stretching back only about a quarter of a century.
Source: Hannigan, John. "Sociology and the Environment." New Society: Sociology for the 21st Century. Ed. Robert Brym. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1998. 361.
In order to carve out a distinctive place for sociology as a new academic discipline, Emile Durkheim and the other founders of the field downplayed the role of biological and physical factors in influencing human affairs while at the same time elevating the importance of norms, groups, and institutions.
Source: Hannigan, John. "Sociology and the Environment." New Society: Sociology for the 21st Century. Ed. Robert Brym. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1998. 362. (slightly abridged)
The existence of a distinct set of environmental attitudes and concerns in our society has been documented by a large number of polls conducted over the last quarter of a century.
Source: Hannigan, John. "Sociology and the Environment." New Society: Sociology for the 21st Century. Ed. Robert Brym. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1998. 365.
People think of Westerns as light entertainment, adolescent and escapist, but there is nothing trivial about the needs they answer.
Source: Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 10.
Socialized to please others, women also acquire early on the ability to sympathize with people whose circumstances are different from their own.
Source: Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 17.
Feminist theorists have shown how movies force women to look at women from the point of view of men, seeing women as sex objects, forcing women to identify against themselves in order to participate in the story.
