Time to Write

It’s time now for you to work on taking notes from your sources to help you when you begin drafting your research essay. You’ll want to establish some kind of clear organizational system, as you see demonstrated in the short video. If your teacher requires notecards, or if you feel more comfortable having hard copies of your notes, notecards may work best for you. Otherwise, you may just want to use your word-processing program to make electronic notes, as shown in the example.

For each of your sources, you should list the publication information and then quotes, paraphrases, or summarized information you may want to use. Be sure to label quotes with a Q, paraphrases with a P, and summarized information with an S.

Also, now is the time to list the page numbers for each bit of information. You don’t want to have to go back later and find the page numbers for your citations.

It may feel time consuming to organize your notes from your research in this way, but a good plan for note taking will save you a lot of time in later stages of the research and writing process and will keep you from having to go back several steps unnecessarily.

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). Located at: https://owl.excelsior.edu/ . This site is licensed under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .