Chapter 6--Managing Information and Taking Notes

Chapter 6 is full of helpful suggestions as how to be organized and keep track of all of the research that we will be doing. Having an organizational plan for managing all of the information that we find, coupled with taking notes will help us to sort out the sources that will be the most useful to us by causing us to keep an account of what we have gleaned from each source and how that information helps us to answer our chosen research questions.

This can be accomplished by having a strategy for saving our print and digital information. A few of the suggestions are to keep our print information in a filling system that makes sense to us be it in a notebook or three ring binder, stacks of related sources with post-it notes or in a filing cabinet. Once an organizational scheme is chosen, it is important to stick with it as having your information organized in numerous ways will cause confusion and you might overlook something valuable. As we gather information we should be sure to note the publication information of each source, record the date you found the information and a brief note regarding your impressions and how we will use the source. Storing our digital information in a single folder will help to keep our information organized. We may also want to consider saving your files to a hard drive, flash drive or even a smartphone in order to allow us more flexibility in when and where we work on the our projects. 

Note taking will allow us to keep track of and have easy access to to information, ideas and arguments. Taking notes as we read our sources allows us a deeper understanding of the material that we have read and helps us to track our impressions. Systematic and careful note taking and writing summaries of the material will also help to safeguard against accidental plagiarism by a) quoting the author precisely or b) using our own words to sum up the ideas that were being put forth and our own impressions about them. 

Lastly, a working and an annotated bibliography will also help us to keep track of our sources and how we intend to use them and why.