When you take notes and jot down ideas, be very careful not to borrow language from your sources. Even if you half-copy the author’s sentences—either by mixing the author’s phrases with your own without using quotation marks or by plugging your synonyms into the author’s sentence structure—you are committing plagiarism, a serious academic offense. To prevent unintentional borrowing, resist the temptation to look at the source as you take notes—except when you are quoting.
Keep the source close by so you can check for accuracy, but don’t try to put ideas in your own words with the source’s sentences in front of you. When you need to quote the exact words of a source, make sure you copy the words precisely and put quotation marks around them.
There are three kinds of note taking: summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Be sure to include exact page references for all three types of notes, since you will need the page numbers later if you use the information in your paper.
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Related topics:
Avoiding plagiarism in an MLA paper
Avoiding plagiarism in an APA paper
Avoiding plagiarism in a CMS (Chicago) paper