Appendix: Reference Handbook

Note Taking

Most note taking involves three kinds of activities: paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing.

451

PARAPHRASING

A paraphrase is a restatement, in your own words, of someone else’s words. If you simply copy someone else’s words—even a mere two or three in a row—you must use quotation marks.

In taking notes, what kind of material should you paraphrase? Any information that you think might be useful: background data, descriptions of mechanisms or processes, test results, and so forth.

Paraphrasing Accurately

Study the original until you understand it thoroughly.
Rewrite the relevant portions of the original. Use complete sentences, fragments, or lists, but don’t compress the material so much that you’ll have trouble understanding it later.
Title the information so that you’ll be able to identify its subject at a glance. The title should include the general subject and the author’s attitude or approach to it, such as “Criticism of open-sea pollution-control devices.”
Include the author’s last name, a short title of the article or book, and the page number of the original. You will need this information later in citing your source.

Figure A.1 shows examples of paraphrasing based on the following discussion. The author is explaining the concept of performance-centered design.

Original Passage

In performance-centered design, the emphasis is on providing support for the structure of the work as well as the information needed to accomplish it. One of the best examples is TurboTax^®, which meets all the three main criteria of effective performance-centered design:

People can do their work with no training on how to use the system. People trying to do their income taxes have no interest in taking any kind of training. They want to get their taxes filled out correctly and quickly, getting all the deductions they are entitled to. These packages, over the years, have moved the interface from a forms-based one, where the user had to know what forms were needed, to an interview-based one that fills out the forms automatically as you answer questions. The design of the interface assumes no particular computer expertise.
The system provides the right information at the right time to accomplish the work. At each step in the process, the system asks only those questions that are relevant based on previous answers. The taxpayer is free to ask for more detail or may proceed through a dialog that asks more-detailed questions if the taxpayer doesn’t know the answer to the higher-level question. If a taxpayer is married filing jointly, the system presents only those questions for that filing status.
452

Both tasks and systems change as the user understands the system. When I first used TurboTax 6 years ago I found myself going to the forms themselves. Doing my taxes generally took about 2 days. Each year I found my need to go to the forms to be less and less. Last year, it took me about 2 hours to do my taxes, and I looked at the forms only when I printed out the final copy.

a. Inappropriate paraphrase

This paraphrase is inappropriate because the three bulleted points are taken word for word from the original. The fact that the student omitted the explanations from the original is irrelevant. These are direct quotes, not paraphrases.

b. Appropriate paraphrase

Figure A.1 Inappropriate and Appropriate Paraphrased Notes

Source: Adapted from Lovgren, 2000: www.reisman-consulting.com/pages/a-Perform.html.

This paraphrase is appropriate because the words are different from those used in the original.

When you turn your notes into a document, you are likely to reword your paraphrases. As you revise your document, check a copy of the original source document to be sure you haven’t unintentionally reverted to the wording from the original source.

QUOTING

For more about formatting quotations, see “Punctuation” in Appendix, Part B.

Sometimes you will want to quote a source, either to preserve the author’s particularly well-expressed or emphatic phrasing or to lend authority to your discussion. Avoid quoting passages of more than two or three sentences, or your document will look like a mere compilation. Your job is to integrate an author’s words and ideas into your own thinking, not merely to introduce a series of quotations.

Although you probably won’t be quoting long passages in your document, recording a complete quotation in your notes will help you recall its meaning and context more accurately when you are ready to integrate it into your own work.

The simplest form of quotation is an author’s exact statement:

As Jones states, “Solar energy won’t make much of a difference for at least a decade.”

453

To add an explanatory word or phrase to a quotation, use brackets:

As Nelson states, “It [the oil glut] will disappear before we understand it.”

Use ellipses (three spaced dots) to show that you are omitting part of an author’s statement:

ORIGINAL STATEMENT	“The generator, which we purchased in May, has turned out to be one of our wisest investments.”
ELLIPTICAL QUOTATION	“The generator . . . has turned out to be one of our wisest investments.”

According to the documentation style recommended by the Modern Language Association (MLA), if the author’s original statement has ellipses, you should add brackets around the ellipses that you introduce:

ORIGINAL STATEMENT	“I think reuse adoption offers . . . the promise to improve business in a number of ways.”
ELLIPTICAL QUOTATION	“I think reuse adoption offers . . . the promise to improve business [ . . . ] .”

SUMMARIZING

Summarizing is the process of rewriting a passage in your own words to make it shorter while still retaining its essential message. Writers summarize to help them learn a body of information or create a draft of one or more of the summaries that will go into the document.

Summarizing

The following advice focuses on extracting the essence of a passage by summarizing it.

Read the passage carefully several times.
Underline key ideas. Look for them in the titles, headings, topic sentences, transitional paragraphs, and concluding paragraphs.
Combine key ideas. Study what you have underlined. Paraphrase the underlined ideas. Don’t worry about your grammar, punctuation, or style at this point.
Check your draft against the original for accuracy and emphasis. Check that you have recorded statistics and names correctly and that your version of a complicated concept faithfully represents the original. Check that you got the proportions right; if the original devotes 20 percent of its space to a particular point, your draft should not devote 5 percent or 50 percent to that point.
Record the bibliographic information carefully. Even though a summary might contain all your own words, you still must cite it, because the main ideas are someone else’s. If you don’t have the bibliographic information in an electronic form, put it on a card.