How to Organize Research Notes

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Laura Turner and I'm going to tell you today about how to organize your research notes. A research paper can be extremely difficult to organize and one of the things even more difficult is getting all the books back to your room and figuring out what quotes came from where. To save yourself some time, when doing your big research paper, as you go through the paper, as I've done in this example, write down in bold all the information that you are going to need for your citation's page. So you don not have to take the book with you from the library to your home. So go ahead and write that down in bold or type that down rather, and then after the title of the book, take all the quotes that you want from that book verbatim, with page numbers, so that you don't have to even go back and find the page number. I don't know how many times I left a book in the library and couldn't remember what page that quote was on that I liked about a certain play or novel that I was writing about. So just to save yourself some time get organized and make your own research note page as you go along through your research so you won't have to go back to the library again and again to get your notes. And once you've gotten these notes down, the advantage of having it in your computer already is that you can therefore, copy and paste your notes into your paper so that you actually have a little template to go back and forth from so you won't have to be taking time out of your writing to recopy a quotation from a page in a book that you are not sure if it's the right book or what the information of it is. So just to get yourself organized I would suggest creating an actual document that holds all of your notes for you."