Take Notes While You Read

• By developing a habit of reading and writing in conjunction, both skills will improve.
• Invest your research time in understanding your sources and integrating them into your own thinking.

Don't depend on underlining and highlighting. Find your own words for notes in the margin (or on "sticky" notes).

• the main ideas
• the thesis
• the author's main points to support the theory

Keep a reading journal

Make an outline of the paper

The idea is to create some organized information about the paper that will help you sort out the details.

• Highlight the major points of the paper
• This can be as detailed as you need it to be

Create a list of questions

• about parts that you don't understand
• about parts where you question their solution/proof/methods/results

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, compress 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 sub points that explain or exemplify.

• Save bother later by developing the habit of recording bibliographic information in a master list when you begin looking at each source (don't forget to note book and journal information on photocopies).
• 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.

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 note taking 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.