Dissertation help: effective note-taking strategies
Whether you are conducting research for a dissertation or for a high school research paper, effective note-taking strategies can make your project more successful. In previous decades, instructors taught note-taking strategies using old-fashioned paper three-by-five note cards. Students would have a collection of note cards with their sources, numbering the cards as they created them. Students would also have a collections of note cards with actual notes, cross-referenced numerically to each note’s source card. With the advent of the Internet, this type of note-taking ceased to happen. Now, students are on their own to create their own effective note-taking strategies.
Print Outs and Highlighters
One of the most popular note-taking strategies still involves using printed paper. Many students will print the articles that they are using for their dissertations. They include the properly formatted source on the print-out so they can include it in the dissertation without worrying about it. Since there are plenty of websites that will properly format bibliography entries, it is easy to copy and paste those on to copies that are later printed. Students then read and highlight as needed. Then, they store the article in a folder for later use.
Google Docs and Note-Taking
If you prefer not to print out an article, you can use word processing sites to save the articles and the bibliography information. Since many students use sites like Google Docs for coursework, it is easy to save articles as PDFs that can later be changed into documents that can be highlighted. Google Docs also allows users to take notes on their documents. This type of note-taking works in the same way as printing out articles, but you will not need to use paper. An added benefit of using Google Docs for note-taking is that Docs saves everything that you do.
Notebooks and Physically Writing
Students who prefer writing while taking notes can use notebooks for the dissertation notes. Spiral notebooks are very inexpensive and they take up very little space. It is a common fact that many students are able to remember more information if they actually write it down rather than type it, so writing notes in a notebook can be a helpful way to prepare for a large research project. Whatever you do, never forget to write the source that the note came from so you do not have to waste time finding the source.
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