As you begin finding the sources that you need for your research, you will need to record certain details about them. At the end of every research paper, you will need to include a bibliography page. This page lists details about the sources in your paper, such as authors’ names, titles, page numbers, and more. It’s important that you have a system for taking notes about your sources. You will need them not only when you create your bibliography, but when you draft your paper as well.
I have created a note-taking document that you can print and use when you write your research paper. Click the link, and let’s look at this document together. You can either type into it or download and print it for this lesson. Notice that every page you print will have space for two sources. At the top, you should write your research question.
This information should be enough to get you started when you write your first draft. You will need more for your bibliography, but it is better to worry about that when you know exactly which sources you will use. You will learn how to document your sources in another lesson, “Documenting Sources and Writing a Bibliography/Works Cited.”
Let’s look more closely at the last section, “Summary, quote, or paraphrase.” Summaries, quotations, and paraphrases will be covered completely in the lesson, “Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting Source Material Accurately,” but here’s a quick discussion.
When you summarize, you restate the ideas of an entire source in a few sentences. A summary must be in your own words. If you use any words or phrases from the original source, you must put them in quotation marks. You might summarize a book, article, or Web site.
When you paraphrase, you take a passage from your source material and put it into your own words. Paraphrases are shorter than the original material. Quotations are exact words from the source set off with quotation marks. Whenever you use words that are not your own, you must set them off in quotation marks and identify the original author of those words. Quotations work best when the author has said something striking that you think your reader needs to see in the original wording.
For example, suppose I use the book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan as a source. If I were to summarize the book, I would say that it’s a book about how the American diet has come to rely on convenient, prepared foods that aren’t healthy and aren’t really as tasty as freshly-prepared foods. I might also like to paraphrase his introduction by writing that Pollan traces the shift in the American diet to the 1980s when food manufacturers began marketing foods as “nutrients.” They started using science to convince us that their foods would lower our cholesterol or prevent diabetes better than the foods we prepared ourselves. If I were to quote Pollan, I might write that Pollan’s solution to our unhealthy eating habits is simply this: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I would use that quote because it is an elegant, concise summary of his position.