Research Paper Notecards

Your completed card should have all of the information you need to begin to format your outline and begin to write your paper There are many different ways to utilize notecards, but one thing is certain – the more effective your note-taking skills, the more effective your final paper. Have you formatted them differently than our examples?

A number is placed in the upper left-hand corner of the card, which corresponds to the source.

When it’s time to create an outline and organize your paper, the source information will be numbered in the order of use for easy access.

Notecards help students organize facts, visualize an outline and ultimately transform their research into a paper.

Super Notecard works on various devices and gives teachers tools to launch the lesson and manage the results.

Another way to format your research notecards is shown below.

This example is similar to the example above, but here the writer has written whether the information is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized in the lower right corner: Some writers find it useful to write the full bibliographic information on a separate card (Ex. An alternative is to write the full bibliographic information on the back side of the notecard, though some writers feel two-sided notecards can be confusing.

You might use a direct quote, a paraphrase, or you might want to use a bullet-point list of facts or data.

If you choose to paraphrase, taking time to thoughtfully paraphrase or summarize now will save you time in the writing stage.

Getting Started Index cards can be used several different ways.

In the example below, separate cards are used for the quote and source information.