Taking Notes from Research Reading

If you take notes competently, you can read with more understanding and also save time and irritation when you come to write your paper. These are three main guidelines that you can use

1. Know what kind of ideas that you need to put down

Focus your approach to the topic before you commence detailed research. Then you will read with a desired purpose in mind, and you will be able to identify relevant ideas.

• To begin with, review the commonly known facts about your topic, and also acquaint yourself with the range of thinking and opinions on it. Review your textbook and class notes or browse for reference work.
• Try making a preliminary listing of the subtopics you would anticipate to find in your reading. These will direct your attention and may also come in as labels for notes. 
  
• Choose an angle or component that interests you, perhaps one on which there exist some controversy. Now formulate your research question. It should provide room for reasoning as well as gathering of relevant information. You may even want to write down a faltering thesis statement as a preliminary answer to your question. Then you will know what to look for in your research reading:  Theories and facts that help answer your question, and other people's opinions regarding some answers.

2. Do not write down too much

Your essay must be an expression of your own thoughts, not a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas. Plan therefore to invest your research time in understanding your sources and integrating them into your own thoughts. Your note sheets will record only ideas that are pertinent to your focus on the topic. They will mostly summarize rather than quote.

• Copy out exact words only when the thoughts are memorably phrased or astonishingly expressed— that’s when you might use them as authentic quotations in your essay.
• Otherwise, compress ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing word by word is a waste of time. Choose the most imperative ideas and write them down as headings or labels. Then fill in with a few sub-points that explain or exemplify.
• Do not depend on highlighting and underlining. Find your own words for notes in the margin.

3. Label your notes Intelligently

Whether you use pages or cards for note-taking, take notes in a way that allows for later use.

• Save bother later by mounting the habit of recording bibliographic content in a master list when you begin looking at each source (don't forget to put down journal and book information on photocopies). Then you can swiftly 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 without difficulty from your master list. Keep a format guide useful.
• Try as much as possible to put notes on separate sheets or cards. This will permit  you to label the topic of each note. Not only will that keep your note-taking efficient, but it will also allow for grouping and synthesizing of ideas later. It is satisfying to shuffle notes and see how the conjunctions bring about new ideas.
• Leave lots of space in your notes for comments, questions and reactions as you read second thoughts and cross-references when you look back at what you have written. These comments can become a virtual first draft of your paper.