Research Paper 02: Note Cards

One of the tools that you will use during the research project will be note cards. Using note cards is a simple and easy way to break larger texts down into smaller units, noting the most important or relevant information from your source material. The other great advantage of note cards is that they are manipulative, objects that you can manipulate with your hands to sort, order, categorize, organize, etc. They also reduce your need to continue leafing through all the pages of your longer source material texts.

There are essentially three typs of note cards, which are:

1. summary – condensed or shortened statement that restates the core or essence of a larger chunk of source material (concentration)
2. paraphrase – restatement of source material in different words to clarify or simplify (re-creation)
3. direct quote – quotations or text stated directly in source material (extraction)

The italicized words in parenthesis are keywords that capture the essence of what you are doing when making each kind of note.

Mini-Objective 3: Generate note cards from source material

One key question is knowing what to note. This is always more challenging in the begining of any search. You need to learn a little before you can learn a lot. Once you have familiarized yourself with the author’s life, the more important aspects should start to appear and be more recognizable. This will also become even more clear once you begin to read their work. However, until then take note of the follwoing:

• specific references to the author’s life in their work
• turning points in the author’s life
• general family background
• important experiences – especially those of youth

Keep things simple - one note per card.

In many ways, the note taking process early in a research project is a bit like a commercial fishing expedition. You go out to sea and cast your nets to catch as many fish as you can, all the while knowing that you may have to throw some back because they are not big enough. You also know that if you don’t catch many fish on one day, you will need to return to the water another day and try again, , searching for larger numbers of fish.

Lastly, any note cards that you generate from material that you have already highlighted (yellow), establishing it as general or common knowledge in your source material, should be marked in such a way that you know this is the case.

For those of you that want to use the Word template I developed for note cards, simply download it to your computer or network drive. However, it is an extra tool for your use not a requirement.

Deadline: Monday, March 17 – 25 note cards