As you read, you will need to collect, organize, and store information that is relevant to your essay or research project. How we take notes has changed considerably since the days when I sat in library study carrels with stacks of index cards and yellow pads. Nonetheless, need to collect, store, and organize notes has not changed. Here are a few suggestions to help you take notes efficiently.

1. Narrow your research topic.

Rather than trying to take notes on everything about your topic in general, it would be far less work if you focus your approach to the topic before you start detailed research. Narrow your topic to a specific idea or issue you wish to study. A narrowed topic will help you find relevant information more quickly since you will be able to see the relevant ideas more quickly.

• First, get the big picture about your topic, and also become aware of the range of thinking and opinions on it. Review textbooks and browse in an encyclopedia or other reference works.

• Next, make a list of the subtopics you discovering in your background reading. These will provide key words to guide your search for information and might also help you organize your notes later by serving as labels for groups of notes.

• Then, choose an angle to your topic that interests you and formulate your research question. Your narrowed topic should allow for reasoning as well as gathering of information. (See Thesis Statements for more information.)

2. Take notes judiciously.

Remember that your essay or research project is a product of your own thinking, not a patchwork of quotes and borrowed ideas. Instead it is better to integrate your sources into your own thinking about the topic. Then take notes judiciously so that you record only ideas that are relevant to your focus on the topic. Paraphrase in your notes; this helps you learn and master the material as you research the topic. Limit the number of direct quotes you record in your notes, being careful to mark direct quotes clearly if you do record them.

• Direct quotes are generally acceptable only when the ideas are memorably phrased or surprisingly expressed, or when the original source has an error that you will discuss in your paper, or when you are citing examples from the original that you wish to discuss at length in your essay or paper.

3. Organize.

Whether you use index cards, legal pads, or word processors for note-taking, take notes in a way that make them easy to use later.

• Always record a work's complete bibliographic information as you begin note-taking. Keep the bibliographic information in a master list (which then can be incoporated into the final paper as your Works Cited list). Having record the bibliographic information in the master list, you need then only to identify each note briefly by recording the author's name and page number. Keep a format guide handy. (See Documentation Formats in Chapter 8).

• In the "old days," when I would record notes on paper, the standard advice was to try as far as possible to put each note on a separate index card or sheet. This allows you to label the topic of each note. Not only will that keep your notetaking focussed, but it will also allow for grouping and synthesizing of ideas later.
  
  These days, however, I prefer to take notes with my word processor, a natural outgrowth of the fact that the internet has become a major information tool, that libraries now keep periodicals in databases accessible online, and that computers are available in many libraries, so that I need only carry my floppy disk back and forth between home and the library when I do research with reference materials that do not circulate.
  
  Word processors as notetaking tools also have the advantage of helping me organize my notes, since I can drag and drop (or cut and paste) notes quickly into different parts of my document. I can also use the "outline view" feature of most modern word processors to get a big picture sense of my notes as I am working.

• If you are recording notes on paper (index cards or pads), leave lots of white space in your notes for your own comments, questions, and reactions to your reading. These comments can virtually become the first draft of your paper.

Next: Outlining