Notetaking
Organize your notes. We use our computer as a filing cabinet. Set up
a folder for your research project, and within that folder, create sub-folders corrresponding to any sub-points or components of your topic.
For example, if your general topic is immigration, you might have sub-folders
on topics such as the following: legal immigration, illegal immigration,
human rights abuses, and similar subdivisions of the issue.
Take notes in your own words, unless you think you might want to quote
directly from your source. Paraphrase
or summarize information whenever possible. If you quote, select only
passages that are distinctively expressed. Here is a paper
on affirmative action that used these sources.
Try this excellent exercise on paraphrasing and quoting that was developed
by the University of Wisconsin Writing Center:
Paraphrasing
and Quoting Exercise
Use Bookmarks to Annotate Web Sites.
Consider using bookmarks as a way of taking brief notes from Web sources.
You can annotate your Netscape Notes by going to the Bookmark Edit
menu and selecting "properties."
You can also bookmark the files you save with a word processor.
Create Electronic Notecards.
Below is a sample notecard that you can create with a word processor
by copying the form below
and pasting it into your word processing file as many times as necessary.
If you save your notecards to a common file, you will be able to reorganize
them using the commands of your word processor.
Sample Notecard
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