The detail and length of your paper should determine how many cards and piles you will have.Īfter you have arranged the cards into piles, each of the topic piles becomes a body paragraph in your research paper. Depending on how extensive your paper is, you can have several piles and several cards for each of those piles. When you’re done, you should arrange your cards in piles – one pile for each topic. Group all of the cards with the same topic together. Make sure that you know which form of citation your teacher requires.Īs soon as you have jotted down all of the information for your research in your cards, you can go back to the beginning then start organizing your cards according to topic. It is also very important to be very accurate with the page numbers on your cards because you will need them for the citations throughout your paper. If you can consistently paraphrase at this stage of your research, it will be most likely that you will not be accidentally plagiarizing another person’s work.Moreover, you will do less work because you are already writing your paper. You will find it helpful to summarize or paraphrase your research on the cards while taking down notes. You can write the title on each of the cards or you can just list your sources on a different piece of paper.If you adopt the latter, you will assign your sources in the list with a and then use these numbers on the cards to indicate which source you took the information from.

When doing research, it’s recommended that you assign a number for each of your sources rather than writing down the whole title. The source title should be the name of the magazine, website, book, and others, in which you took the information.It’s necessary to have these topics once you start to organize your research. This means that you won’t write down facts that aren’t relevant to your paper if you write the topic down for each of the cards. This system of giving each note a title may seem tedious, but it serves the following purposes: It will keep you focused on your research. After you have written the information down, you have to think about how you can categorize or title it briefly. Consider it the title or the main gist of your card. The card topic is the name that you will think of yourself. Make the topic of the card the title for the type of information you write on it.Here are some things to include on the cards to help to put your ideas in an organized manner while helping you remember where you found those ideas: Each sentence and relevant idea that you come across should get summarized using your own words than written on the card. Later, when you start to write your paper, you can convert each card into a body paragraph in your paper.Īfter coming up with a note card design, you can write down all of the interesting facts in the course of your research. For each of the topics, you can have note sheet templates from various sources.

With this, you can categorize all of the information you collect by topic. But you can make it a lot easier on yourself by using a note card template as you collect information. Without this aspect, it will take more time to compose your research paper. When writing a research paper, the most significant part of research before you sit down and start writing is to first organize your information.

Avery notecard