Have you ever worked on a term paper and had trouble organizing your thoughts and ideas? Developing an organized system of recording, categorizing and organizing notecards is a useful strategy to keep your ideas in order so that when you go to write the paper, you have a concrete direction to focus from.
After you finish gathering your sources and taking notes, keep a set of 4x6 notecards and record the title, author and a fact about the source; you can also write in the bottom left hand corner what section in the paper, to include the facts. On the back of the card, paraphrase the information that you recorded from the resource into your own words. This will make the transition to writing the paper itself easier since you will be fine tuning your writing skills as you summarize the information you’ve gathered. This is also an important precaution to take to avoid plagiarism. Once you have recorded your facts on all of your notecards, arrange them into piles, label which sections and topics the information will go into. When you have this information organized, it will make the transition to writing your paper much easier.