Research Guide: Organizing/Note taking/Outlining

Here are some useful sites to help you get organized for your research paper!

English Companion - notetaking

  Thoughtboxes makes it easy to get organized, complete tasks, and collaborate with your friends.

The outline is the skeleton of a good piece of writing and supplies the structural foundation for a well-written report.  Your paper's outline should be:

• Complete enough to cover your topic from head to toe.
• Ordered to ensure that each part is properly connected to its neighbor parts.
• Coordinated to maintain balance and consistency.
• Interconnected, so that all parts work together in a unified whole.
• Flexible enough to allow for growth and development.

Good writers use three strategies—summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting—to blend source materials in with their own, while making sure their own voice is heard.

Summarizing involves putting the main idea(s) or one or several writers into your own words, including only the main point(s). Once again, it is necessary to attribute summarized ideas to the original source. Summarized ideas are not necessarily presented in the same order as in the original source. Summaries are significantly shorter than the original and take a broad overview of the source material.

Summarize when:

• You want to establish background or offer an overview of a topic
• You want to describe common knowledge (from several sources) about a topic
• You want to determine the main ideas of a single source

Paraphrasing means rephrasing the words of an author, putting his/her thoughts in your own words. A paraphrase can be viewed as a “translation” of the original source. When you paraphrase, you rework the source’s ideas, words, phrases, and sentence structures with your own. Paraphrased text is often, but not always, slightly shorter than the original work. Like quotations, paraphrased material must be followed with in-text documentation and cited the on the Works-Cited page.

Paraphrase when:

• You plan to use information on your note cards and wish to avoid plagiarizing
• You want to avoid overusing quotations
• You want to use your own voice to present information

Quotations are the exact words of an author, copied directly from the source word for word. Quotations must be cited!

Use quotations when:

• You want to add the power of an author’s words to support your argument
• You want to disagree with an author’s argument
• You want to highlight particularly eloquent or powerful phrases or passages
• You are comparing and contrasting specific points of view
• You want to note the important research that precedes your own

Notetaking is an important part of writing a research paper. Your notes record information from the sources that you will use in writing your paper. Therefore, it is necessary to critically evaluate the texts or articles you are reading and to make reasonable choices about what will and will not be useful for your paper. Otherwise, you will overload yourself with information and spend too much time sifting through notes.

To take effective notes, it helps to do the following:

1. Understand the information. Before you can use information, you must understand it. Taking notes is a good way to develop your knowledge and comprehension of a subject; it is not just a mechanical process of recording data. Reading a source, making decisions about what is useful for your essay, and writing the notes on index cards or in a notebook will encourage you to think more deeply about what you are reading as well as how it relates to the subject of your research.

2. Select the information: The information to be used in a paper must be gathered from a variety of sources, which also, most likely, contain much information not necessarily relevant to your topic. Therefore, when you take notes, you must sort out the material you need from other information surrounding it in the text.

3. Record the information: To efficiently use the information in your sources, you must record it in such a way that it can be easily sorted, reorganized, and incorporated into your paper. This means that you should choose a style of recording that best suits you and that lists all necessary information-- title, author, publisher, etc., which you will need later for your bibliography.

Using your own words, take notes that briefly summarize the most important points of each source. Try to be as clear and concise as possible in your notetaking and try to omit details that are not relevant to your topic. Stick to main points rather than involved discussion or digressions.

The following methods will enable you to read your sources with understanding and take good notes:

1. A well-written article or book chapter usually makes a single main point and supports that point with a discussion of a series of subtopics related to it. Before you start writing notes, scan the complete piece of writing to determine what the main point is, what subtopics are discussed, and how each subtopic relates to the main point. An effective method of scanning is to read the first several paragraphs of a section, and then read the first (topic) sentence of each remaining paragraph. When you get to the concluding paragraph, read all of it. If your source is a book, the table of contents may help guide you to information that fits your topic.

2. After scanning the entire chapter or article, write your understanding of the author(s) thesis (her/his main point), in your own words. In addition, it is a good idea to read the section in the text that contains the author's first subtopic. The length of this segment will vary, but in the average book or substantial article, it will usually be discussed for one to five pages. After reading, scan the section again to make sure you understand the most significant points in it. Now, write your understanding of the subtopics in that section; of course, you also need to do this in your own words. Paraphrasing will help you to better understand the author's ideas rather than just mechanically copying them.

3. When you take notes, be as concise as possible, omitting unnecessary details and digressions. It is not always necessary to write complete sentences or even complete words-- occasionally abbreviation saves time--as long as what you have written will be clear to you when you consult your notes later. If you consider that the author's words are necessary to clarify a point, copy them exactly and put them in quotation marks. (It is a good idea to make note of the author's last name as well).

4. Remember to record the page number(s) in the text or article that corresponds to your notes. In addition, make sure you have all bibliographical information recorded for each source either on one index card or in your notebook.

5. Always try to review the chapter or article after notetaking to make sure your notes are accurate and complete.