Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Take useful notes
Engaging sources
Writing your paper

Readers will judge your paper not just by the quality of your sources and how accurately you report them, but also by how deeply you engage them. To do that, you must take notes in a way that not only reflects but encourages a deeper understanding of your project.

5.3.1 Take Notes to Advance Your Thinking

Many inexperienced researchers think that note-taking is just a matter of recording data. Once they find a source, they photocopy pages or write down exactly what's on them. If that's all you do, if you don't talk back to your sources actively, you will simply accumulate a lot of inert information that will be equally inert in your report.

If you photocopy sources, annotate the copied pages to encourage your critical thinking. Pick out sentences that express crucial elements in its argument (its claim, major reasons, and so on). Label them in the margin. Then mark information that you might use as evidence in your report. (If you use a highlighter, use different colors to indicate these different elements.)

Summarize what you've highlighted or sketch a response to it on the back of the page, or make notes in the margin to help you interpret the highlighting. Be sure to indicate how you think the source supports or complicates your argument. The more you write about a source now, the better you will understand and remember it later.

5.3.2 Record Relevant Context for Each Key Point

Those who deliberately misreport sources are dishonest, but an honest researcher can mislead inadvertently if she merely records words and ignores their qualifications, complications, or role in a larger argument. To guard against misusing a source, follow these guidelines:

1. Record the context of a quotation. When you note an important conclusion, record the author's line of reasoning:

Not: Bartolli (p. 123): The war was caused . . . by Z.

But: Bartolli: The war was caused by Y and Z (p. 123), but the most important was Z (p. 123), for two reasons: First, . . . (pp. 124—26); Second, . . . (p. 126).

Even if you care only about a conclusion, you'll use it more accurately if you record how a writer reached it.

2. Record the scope and confidence of a statement. Don't make a claim seem more certain or far-reaching than it is. The second sentence below doesn't report the first fairly or accurately:

Original: One study on the perception of risk (Wilson 1988) suggests a correlation between high-stakes gambling and single-parent families.

Misleading report: Wilson (1988) says single-parent families cause high-stakes gambling.

3. Record how a source uses a statement. Is it an important claim, a minor point, a qualification or concession, and so on? Such distinctions help avoid mistakes like this:

Original by Jones: We cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation. But no one who has studied the data doubts that smoking is a causal factor in lung cancer.

Misleading report: Jones claims “we cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation.” Therefore, statistical evidence is not a reliable indicator that smoking causes lung cancer.

5.3.3 Record Keywords That Categorize Your Notes for Sorting

Finally, a conceptually challenging task: as you take notes, categorize each one under two or more keywords (see the upper right corner of fig. 5.1). Don't mechanically use words from the source: categorize the note by what it implies for your question, by a general idea larger than its specific content. Use the same keywords for related notes: don't create a new one for every new note.

This step is crucial because it forces you to find the central ideas in a note. If you take notes on a computer, the keywords let you instantly group related notes with a single Find command. If you use more than one keyword, you can recombine your notes in different ways to discover new relationships (especially important when you feel you are spinning your wheels).

5.3.4 Record How You Think the Note Is Relevant to Your Argument

If you let your question and hypothesis guide your research, you will choose to record information not just because it is on topic, but because it is relevant to the argument you think you can make. Record that information in your notes. Say why you think a source might support or, just as importantly, complicate your argument. At this point, guesses or hunches are OK: you'll have time to reconsider later. But you can't reconsider what you cannot remember. So don't rely on your memory to reconstruct what you were thinking when you decided to make a note.