Taking notes and writing research papers with ndxCards™
A research paper is designed to present the results of your investigations on a selected topic. It will include your thoughts and the facts and ideas you have gathered from a variety of sources. Writing such papers is an essential part of every business and profession, as well as a requirement for most students.
The writing process:
Once you have your topic, you will begin by identifying and gathering source materials - books, magazines, periodicals, interviews, etc. Take notes as you read and acquire information. Create an outline for the paper based on the information you gather, working your notes into it. Then write a rough draft. If you notice any gaps, you can gather additional information. Revise your draft, as many times as is necessary. Finally, edit the last draft and include citations.
The actual process you use may be slightly different, and is certain to be iterative, rather than linear. In any case, the steps listed are necessary to write a good paper. See below for a few links that provide advice on writing papers.
Taking Notes:
As you get information from each source, you should make a separate note of each fact or quotation you might want to use in your paper. This allows you to restructure and edit your outline of notes. ndxCards™ makes this easy. There are cards for Quotation, Paraphrase, and Summary to record facts easily and to link them to citation information. Source cards, Author cards and Publisher cards allow you to enter such information once and have it available for all your papers. In addition, you should use keywords and subjects to help you organize the notes. When you write note cards, you can link them to the sources and keywords, and the auto-complete feature in ndxCards makes entering information easier. You can stop using cryptic abbreviations that become inscrutable later when you need to use the notes.
Making an outline and organizing notes
ndxCards™ comes with a project feature that helps you create an outline of your paper. 'Drop' your note cards into this outline and export the contents into your word-processor and 'voila!' you have your first draft. You can easily add or edit topics in the outline and move notes around. When you export your paper, you can specify that the citations go with it, and all your source information is added at the end of the paper.
Additional information on writing papers:
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