Chapter six

Chapter Six: Managing Information and Taking Notes

Chapter six of the Bedford Researcher is about how to preserve information, whether print or digital information and discusses about different strategies of taking notes that further helps to draft a document without much effort. Working and annotated bibliographies are strategies, to tracks detailed information about sources. With all these strategies, plagiarism is certainly avoided.

It is important to decide how to save and organize print information, either by topic, date, or by type of material. It is good to find a system and stick to it. Indicating dates when recording information is a good reminder of work completed at that particular time.

Saving and organizing digital information includes saving work inside a single folder or multiple folders for bigger amount of files to hold related files, also using descriptive names for file names, copying and pasting into a browser or a word processor, saving for instance all the sources on flash drive, hard drive or smartphone. A way of saving digital sources is determined by their type as web pages, images and other media, databases. There are also other strategies like sending digital documents by e-mail over some databases, or directly to an e-mail or save the information on the phone. Moreover, downloading and printing a page is always a good solution to not lose its content. There are a few more important strategies like bookmarking web sites, by saving bookmarks online, using web capture and clipping tools that can add a web page or portions of a page to a web browser, using bedfordresearcher.com - bibliography tools to save the sources, web document sites to save work when working on more than one computer and backing up the files –making copies of digital files and downloads.

Taking notes has great importance in research writing especially  when working on a project  that involves more than a few sources; it is crucial for finding specific parts of the writing. It also helps to understand better the issue and contribute to the conversation from your own perspective. Methods for taking notes differ and have their own advantages and disadvantages. The most important is to choose a method and use it consistently and in one form, that way it is easier to find information later.

Using a direct quotation is one of the note taking strategies. Quotation marks are necessary for avoiding unintentional plagiarism. If an entire paragraph does not correspond to the project, then the quotation marks are used only for that section of the paragraph. In this way, the original text is changed, and it should be indicated with three spaced periods, called an ellipsis (…).  The brackets are used for the same purpose to modify a direct quotation by changing or adding words, and not changing the original meaning of the passage. Paraphrasing is used to restate a passage from a source in its own words. When paraphrasing, it is important to cite the source because it is the presentation of someone else's ideas. Furthermore, writing too similar to the original is not allowed unless you cite the source. A summary is intended to capture the overall argument and information in a source and also to record a writer’s argument in the case of the disproof. Again all these note taking strategies are important to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Notes can be useful also for tracking a writer’s reactions and impressions, which will give a concrete meaning to the issue. Notes may point to common information, ideas and arguments that multiple sources share. That can be very useful for organizing documents and framing the argument. There are two techniques to compare sources: looking for similarities, for disagreements and for common citations. Another strategy for the taking notes is performed by classifying sources by tagging and labeling, grouping, listing and visualizing.

Good organization of information is carried out with a well-created bibliography. A working bibliography will change significantly during the work on the research writing project. As exploring a topic and choosing an issue, collecting sources, reading them critically and taking notes there will be added potentially useful sources that are most relevant for writing the research paper. It will consist of a works cited or reference list and a bibliography of works consulted list. Annotated bibliography as another form of taking notes represents a brief note about each source, in addition to its complete citation information. It may be a clear description of the content of the sources, as well as a detailed version of the working bibliography, or as an end product of the research writing project.

The last strategy of creating a bibliography to organize information is refining a writer’s argument by turning his working bibliography into his annotated bibliography. The main thing in this strategy is the use of annotated bibliographies for the purpose of re-examining the sources - their information, ideas and reported arguments. It is also necessary for a writer to record his own ideas about the sources and their role in the advancement of his writing position.