Notetaking & Proofreading

Proper notetaking and careful proofreading are very important, and both skills are required to produce accurately-attributed and high-quality works.

Notetaking

Effective notetaking provides not only an invaluable opportunity to develop and organize your own ideas, but also a reliable way to identify and track the original sources of any borrowed material.

By skipping the notetaking step and paraphrasing directly from another source into a draft of your work, you significantly increase the likelihood of plagiarizing the excerpted material, and certainly limit your ability to reflect meaningfully on the borrowed ideas.

As a general rule, you should paraphrase borrowed material and avoid including verbatim passages in your notes unless you intend to quote a source directly. Read the passage carefully, think about what you just read, and then write down—in your own words—the main ideas of the passage.

All direct quotes should be copied accurately and enclosed by quotation marks.

To ensure proper citation of any borrowed material (direct quotes or paraphrased passages), always document the original sources in your notes.

Proofreading

Proofreading is another vital step in the writing process, one that students too often skip.

Do not wait until the proofreading stage to include citations for any material excerpted from other sources. By failing to include citations in your notes or initial draft, you are much more likely to omit references accidentally, perhaps even forgetting the sources of the borrowed ideas or quotations.

Thorough proofreading enables you to verify all references and citations, detect spelling and punctuation errors, and check your draft for overall fluidity and coherence.