NOTE CARDS: As we research, we will use note cards to compile information that
could be used in your paper. A NOTE card includes a few main ingredients: ONE
piece of quoted or paraphrased information from the source, the citation of the
source, the category (research question/heading) under which the piece of
information falls (you will design those categories as you envision the layout of your
paper).
CATEGORY OF INFORMATION
One piece of information from the source, either “QUOTED” (recorded wordfor-word from the source) or PARAPHRASED (summarized from the source in your
own sentence style and vocabulary).
CITATION (Author’s last name and p# if non-web source)
You have two options when it comes to HOW you will record information on your
note cards.
OPTION 1: QUOTING
Quote a source (take an idea, word for word, from the source and place it in
quotation marks) when
 the piece of information is relatively short and cannot be easily rewritten in
your own words (facts, statistics, brief examples), or
 when the wording of the source is especially powerful and meaningful, or
 when you are citing another person’s opinion
TIP—Make sure to quote with CLARITY and ACCURACY. Here are some “do’s”:
 Do make sure you accurately record the writer’s words. Omissions and
errors can lead to the use of faulty/confusing information in your paper.
 Do record necessary context information on your note card to give the
quote relevance. For example, if a line from the source reads “Twenty
percent of students failed the exam by at least fifteen percentage points,”
make sure you clarify on the card which students and what exam. You
can do that in two ways:
o Use brackets [ ] to specify or clarify nouns/pronouns in the
sentence:
Example: “Twenty percent of [fourth-grade students] failed the
[Keystone exam] by at least fifteen percentage points.”
 Use your own contextualizing comments to LEAD INTO the quote.
Example: Of the fourth-graders who took Pennsylvania’s
Keystone this year, “Twenty percent of students failed the exam
by at least fifteen percentage points”
OPTION 2: PARAPHRASING
To paraphrase means to put another’s idea into your own sentence style and
vocabulary. Paraphrase when
 you want to summarize a page or a paragraph describing one idea into a few
sentences (anecdotes, long examples, extensive studies)
 the original idea is written in a complicated way and it needs to be simplified
for the reader of your paper
Students can accidently plagiarize when they do not paraphrase carefully. Some tips
to avoid that situation:
 Make sure you change BOTH the VOCABULARY AND sentence
STRUCTURE/STYLE of the original source’s writing. Only doing one is
insufficient.
 Do not look at the source while paraphrasing. Read it. Put it down. Write a
summary. Re-read source to make sure you’ve got the facts straight.
 It’s difficult to paraphrase ONE simple sentence. For example, if the source
reads “Two dozen officers were killed last year,” it would be tough to
paraphrase without using what’s already there. It’s better to simply quote
the source in such situations.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
NO (SAT is inaccurate predictor)
“De Pauw University… asked its institutional research department to do a study on
past students to see which factors correlated with academic success, ‘The one thing
that made no difference whatsoever was standardized test scores,’ said Cindy
Babington, vice president for student services.”
(Rosenberg)
NO (SAT is inaccurate predictor)
Sheyenne Brown, a disadvantaged student from the Bronx who scored below
Middlebury’s average SAT score but was admitted to the school through the Posse
program, ended up graduating from the school cum laude. Her example proves that
low SAT scores do not necessarily indicate that a student will not do well in college.
(Rosenberg)