For more on synthesizing, see Chapters 12 and 23.
The summaries that you include in a working bibliography or the annotations that you make on a printed or digital copy of a source are useful reminders, but you should also make notes that analyze the text, that synthesize what you are learning with ideas you have gleaned elsewhere or with your own ideas, and that evaluate the quality of the source.
You will mine your notes for language to use in your draft, so be careful to
summarize accurately, using your own words and sentence structures;
paraphrase without borrowing the language or sentence structure of the source;
quote accurately and place all language from the source in quotation marks.
For more on annotating, sources, see Chapter 12; for more on avoiding plagiarism, see Chapter 23.
You can take notes on a photocopy of a printed text or use comments or highlighting to annotate a digital text. Whenever possible, download, print, photocopy, or scan useful sources, so that you can read and make notes at your leisure and so that you can double-