1. Know what kind of ideas you need to record
Focus your approach to the topic before you start detailed research. Then you will read with a purpose in mind, and you will be able to sort out relevant ideas.
- Review the commonly known facts about your topic, and also become aware of the range of thinking and opinions on it. This will likely come from your class notes, textbook, and other reference materials.
- Keep your working thesis statement in mind as you collect information. Remember, you are looking for resources that support your thesis or answer your question. If the information isn't relevant to your paper, move on!
- Remember: facts and theories help answer your question and other people’s professional opinions offer prevailing thoughts about whether specific answers are good ones.
2. Don’t write down too much
Your essay must be an expression of your own thinking, not a patchwork of borrowed ideas. Plan therefore to invest your research time in understanding your sources and integrating them into your own thinking. Your note cards or note sheets will record only ideas that are relevant to your focus on the topic; and they will mostly summarize rather than quote.
- When you quote, you are reproducing another writer’s words exactly as they appear on the page. Copy out exact words only when the ideas are memorably phrased or surprisingly expressed—when you might use them as actual quotations in your essay.
- Otherwise, summarize ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing word by word is a waste of time. Choose the most important ideas and write them down as labels or headings. Then fill in with a few subpoints that explain or exemplify.
- Don’t depend on underlining and highlighting. Find your own words for notes in the margin (or on “sticky” notes).
3. Label your notes intelligently
Whether you use cards or pages for notetaking, take notes in a way that allows for later use.
- It can be a good idea as you research to create a working document with a list of all of the resources you've referenced. Then you can quickly identify each note by the author’s name and page number; when you refer to sources in the essay you can fill in details of publication easily from your master list. This will make writing your works cited/reference pages much easier-- and help protect you from accusations of plagiarism!
- Try as far as possible to put notes on separate cards or sheets. This will let you label the topic of each note. Not only will that keep your notetaking focused, but it will also allow for grouping and synthesizing of ideas later. It is especially satisfying to shuffle notes and see how the conjunctions create new ideas—yours.
- Leave lots of space in your notes for comments of your own—questions and reactions as you read, second thoughts and cross-references when you look back at what you’ve written. These comments can become a virtual first draft of your paper.