A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

Take useful notes
Engaging your sources
Research and writing

Readers will judge your work 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 growing understanding of your project.

4.3.1 Use Note-Taking to Advance Your Thinking

Many inexperienced researchers think that note-taking is a matter of merely recording data. Recording or photocopying can help you quote or paraphrase accurately, but if you don’t engage your sources, you simply accumulate inert data. To advance your thinking, on any pages you’ve copied, annotate key sentences and passages by highlighting or labeling them in the margin. Mark ideas or data that you expect to use in your paper. Summarize what you have highlighted, or sketch a response to it, or add notes in the margin that help you interpret your highlighting. The more you write about a source now, the better you will understand it later.

4.3.2 Take Notes Relevant to Your Question and Working Hypothesis

For sources you think especially useful, record not just facts that you think you can use as evidence but also other information that helps you explain those facts and their relationship to your claim. You can create a template to help with this (see 4.2.1).

The first three items directly support or challenge your working hypothesis:

✵ ▪ reasons that support your hypothesis or suggest a new one

✵ ▪ evidence that supports your reasons

✵ ▪ views that undermine or even contradict your hypothesis (see 5.4.3)

These next items might not support or challenge your hypothesis, but they may help you explain its context or simply make your paper more readable:

✵ ▪ historical background of your question and what authorities have said about it, particularly earlier research (see 6.2.2 and 10.1.1)

✵ ▪ historical or contemporary context that explains the importance of your question

✵ ▪ important definitions and principles of analysis

✵ ▪ analogies, comparisons, and anecdotes that might not directly support your hypothesis but do explain or illustrate complicated issues or simply make your analysis more interesting

✵ ▪ strikingly original language relevant to your topic

4.3.3 Get the Context Right

You can’t record everything, but you have to record enough to ensure that you accurately capture the source’s meaning. As you use material from sources, record not just what they say but how they use the information. Here are some ways to guard against misleading your reader.

1. 1. When you quote, paraphrase, or summarize, be sure to capture the context. 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 X, Y, and Z (p. 123). But the most important cause was Z (p. 123), for two reasons: reason 1 (pp. 124—26); reason 2 (p. 126).

Sometimes you care only about a conclusion, but readers usually want to see how a conclusion emerges from the argument supporting it. So when you take notes, record not only conclusions but also the arguments that support them.

2. 2. When you record a claim, note its role in the original. Is it a main point? A minor point? A qualification or concession? By noting these distinctions, you avoid this kind of mistake:

Original by Jones: “Researchers recognize that lung cancer has a number of causes, including genetic predisposition and exposure to environmental factors such as asbestos, radon, and fine particulates. But no one who has studied the data doubts that lung cancer’s leading cause is smoking.”

Misleading report about Jones: Smoking is just one cause of lung cancer among many. Jones, for example, claims that “lung cancer has a number of causes, including genetic predisposition and exposure to environmental factors such as asbestos, radon, and fine particulates.”

Jones did not make that point at all. He conceded a point to set up a point he wanted to make. Anyone who deliberately misrepresents an author in this way violates basic standards of truth. But you can make such a mistake inadvertently if you note only a source’s words and not their role in an argument.

3. 3. Record the scope and confidence of a claim. These are not the same:

Chemicals in french fries cause cancer.

Chemicals in french fries may be a factor in causing cancer.

Some chemicals in french fries correlate with a higher incidence of cancer.

4. 4. Don’t mistake a summary of another writer’s views for those of an author summarizing them. Some writers do not clearly indicate when they summarize another’s argument, so it’s easy to quote them as saying what they set out to disprove rather than what they in fact believe.

5. 5. Note why sources agree and disagree. Two social scientists might claim that a social problem is caused by personal factors, not by environmental forces, but one might cite evidence from genetic inheritance while the other points to religious beliefs. How and why sources agree is as important as the fact that they do. In the same way, sources might disagree because they interpret the same evidence differently or take different approaches to the problem.

It is risky to attach yourself to what any one researcher says about an issue. It is not “research” when you uncritically summarize another’s work. If you rely on at least two sources, you’ll usually find that they do not agree entirely, and that’s where your own research can begin.