© Michelli

Short Notes - Example

Short notes are powerful, and communicate almost as well as full sentences - and do it much faster, too. For paper grading purposes, the "almost as well" is negligible. I penalise padding and elaborate sentences anyway, and I reward direct language and logical organization. Short notes can make the organization of your paper clearer to you at a stage when you have the time to make improvements. Look:

Paragraph on Donatello's St George Relief at Orsanmichele, Florence

On the base of the niche Donatello worked a low relief of the Saint slaying the dragon and freeing the Princess of Cappadocia. The technique with which this is executed is called rilievo stiacciato [also schiacciato] or flattened relief and was the first example of a long series of scenes in which the artist applied techniques characteristic of painting and drawing to relief in marble. The shallowness of the cutting enabled Donatello to place figures in movement against a landscape, in which careful attention to linear perspective created an illusion of space. Once more Donatello was experimenting with new forms of artistic expression unknown to either the [Classical] or Gothic worlds. (111 words)

Donatello's St George relief, Orsanmichele, Florence, 1416
    - on base of niche; in very low relief (rilievo stiaccato)
    - first of many using 2-D techniques, e.g. linear perspective
        - Don again pioneering innovative art forms
        (32 words)

Donatello's St George relief, Orsanmichele, Florence, 1416 - on base of niche - in very low relief (rilievo stiaccato). First of many using 2-D techniques, e.g. linear perspective. Don again pioneering innovative art forms. (32 words)

Comments

Note that these notes have extracted only the salient points of the paragraph above, but that they make sense as they stand. Notice some of the techniques:

• Full identification given as a subheading
  This makes it unnecessary to repeat the artist's name or any of the rest of the information.
• Using dashes (or asterisks or anything else you like) to mark the beginning of each indented section, makes it clear where each thought, or chain of thoughts begins, even if your chain of thoughts is so long that the lines wrap
• Using prepositions ("on", "in") makes the phrase clearer. For example, if the first line began with "base of niche", the reader might think you were saying that this was a normal place for a relief, or that the relief showed the base of a niche.
• Condensing a long sentence like the last one by using different language lets you bring out the implications of the sentence effectively, and shows that you understand the statement. It doesn't matter that Donatello "experimented" with these forms, but it does matter that he was the first to do so (remember Ghiberti's imperative that every artist should contribute to the progress of art in every work). "Pioneering" lets you cover the ideas of "experiment" and "being first", and even suggests some sense of purpose; and "innovative" lets you cover the ideas of "progress" and "influence" [on other artists]. Powerful?