subject: For Better Researching, Use Note Cards [print this page] Any time you are researching a topic, probably for some sort of paper but maybe just for your own edification, you will likely run into a problem. Unless you have a photographic memory, you are going to need to write down some of the information you come across.
Let's say you pull out a piece of paper and start taking notes. You write down a piece of information. It looks like it will go somewhere near the end of your paper. Now, you open a different book and find another piece of information. Hey, that would be perfect for the beginning of your paper! Uh-oh. Your previous note fits in with the end of your paper. If you write down the note for the beginning underneath it, and then your write down more and more notes, all in the order you find them, your notes will be a jumbled-up mess when you finish. How will you ever find anything? The solution: note cards. Note cards have many advantages over other methods of taking notes, and this guide will explain how to use them.
A note card is just a small index card, probably 3x5 or 4x6, that you use to write down relevant bits of information. The great thing about note cards, though, is that you can organize them any which way, so it's easy to keep track of how the different pieces of information fit together.
In addition, if you find a sentence about a certain topic in one book, and then another sentence about the same topic in another book, you can write down the second piece of information on the same card that has the first piece! This is much better than trying to collate twenty pages of scribbled notes that you can barely read in the first place, frantically trying to remember how this relates to that as you write your paper.
There are many standardized formats for notes cards, and if you take a class where you have to use note cards, you will probably encounter one of them. At its most simple, however, a note card only needs to have to things on it: a piece of information, and the source of that piece of information. Try to include page numbers in case you need to look something up later. There are three basic types of information you will want to include on your note cards: direct quotes, paraphrases, and summaries. It is good to write somewhere on each card what type of information that card contains.
Beyond these basic guidelines, however, you can do virtually anything with your note cards: you are limited only by your imagination and what works for you. Experiment, try new things, and you'll be amazed at how effective your researching will become!
