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Continuing my threads on active reading, highlighting & scribbling. My undergrad students ask me how to identify the main idea of a paper. From the title, I see this paper is on the formality/informality dichotomy. The authors say Lipton 1978 is an early critique (2nd paragraph) 
Given that I’m writing a paper on informal waste pickers, knowing the early critiques of the formal/informal dichotomy would be useful to me. I do a backward citation tracing exercise and find Bromley 1978.
(I misquoted author in my first tweet - early critique is by Bromley 1978, which offers a series of items that allow you to detect whether an activity can be defined as formal or as informal - see my screen grab) - doing this allows me to follow Guha-Khasnobis et al and Bromley.
It takes GK et al up until page 4 to make their core point (two different ways of looking at formality and informality) - but that’s good because now I have identified two ways in which I may assess formality or informality (distance from government and organization type)
As you can tell, I scanned the text for the core idea (informality is a continuum, 2 dimensions are key). BUT once I arrive to page 7 I discover that there are other important ideas (interventions, lessons learned) - I do the same process (scan for key idea of each section)
Repeating this process (scanning sections for key ideas) makes my reading more efficient, and my summarizing better. I can drop my marginalia into my Everything Notebook raulpacheco.org/2018/12/note-t…, an index card raulpacheco.org/2018/11/note-t… or even Cornell Notes raulpacheco.org/2018/12/note-t…
Or perhaps I could drop this into my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump raulpacheco.org/2016/06/synthe… or maybe I'll want to write a Synthetic Note raulpacheco.org/2017/05/writin… - but since I'm already steeped in informality literature, perhaps I'll expand to a memorandum raulpacheco.org/2017/05/writin…
As I have said in this blog post raulpacheco.org/2019/07/readin… and in earlier threads, I totally recognize that it's challenging to identify a core idea if authors don't start their paragraphs with topic sentences. But developing heuristics to scan for key ideas is a useful skill.
Continuing my thread in active reading and heuristics to “comb” through a paper to find key ideas. Personally, I love cardboard index cards. I’m old fashioned and analog. I use these three sizes:
I summarized the whole formal/informal definition on one side of an index card (bibliographic reference at the top). I prefer to write just on one side of an index card, but many people continue on the back.
Grabbing quotations to cite in analog format takes much longer. This is why combining analog and digital is helpful. If I had my laptop open I could just copy and paste from the PDF to my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump
On the theoretical/conceptual level, I really love this book / it’s a volume that studies policy interventions in the informal sector, a topic I’ve studied for years. The assumption of formalization as a strategy for development is exactly an assumption. It needs to be tested.
The second part of the chapter is on policy interventions, beyond the definition of formal and informal. When authors make a list, it’s useful to scan the chapter (and the full book!) for those items in the list (for example the themes in the book)
My vision of a second index card for this paper would be a brief summary of the lessons learned/policy interventions discussion. I’m moving to a different paper but this will be a useful exercise for my students in the fall (summarize one article in two index cards or less).
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