Taking Good Notes

DCG Middle School

November 2011

Taking Notes

It is critical that you take good notes so you don’t plagiarize in your paper; plagiarizing is a crime, not just something schools prohibit.

When taking good notes, you have 3 options:1. Summarizing2. Paraphrasing3. Quoting directly

Summarizing Although it won’t happen often, sometimes you will need

to summarize large portions of text. For this type of work, your summaries will most likely be the main idea of the passage and key details. You must include the author’s name OR first word in the source title, plus the page number.

Practice sample with an original passage from page 23 in Obesity and the Media, by Frances O’Connor:

It is also common for movie and cartoon characters—which young kids will easily recognize—to “star” in snack food commercials. Foods such as Cheez-It crackers and fruit snacks use characters like Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer so that kids will connect the food with the character or television show that they like.

A correct summary: O’Connor notes that snack food commercials often feature characters young children will recognize and with whom they can connect (23).

Paraphrasing One of the most common note taking tools is

paraphrasing, putting the author’s ideas into your own words. Even if you paraphrase, you still have to give credit to the source for the idea.

Here’s the same original passage from page 23 in Obesity and the Media, by Frances O’Connor: It is also common for movie and cartoon characters—which young

kids will easily recognize—to “star” in snack food commercials. Foods such as Cheez-It crackers and fruit snacks use characters like Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer so that kids will connect the food with the character or television show that they like.

A correct paraphrase: Movie and cartoon characters often appear in commercials for snacks. Popular snack foods use these characters to appeal to children (O’Connor 23).

Quoting Directly It’s okay to use an author’s exact words if you put them

inside quotations marks and give credit to the source.

Here’s the same original passage from page 23 in Obesity and the Media, by Frances O’Connor:

It is also common for movie and cartoon characters—which young kids will easily recognize—to “star” in snack food commercials. Foods such as Cheez-It crackers and fruit snacks use characters like Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer so that kids will connect the food with the character or television show that they like.

A correct direct quote: According to O’Connor, “Foods such as Cheez-It crackers and fruit snacks use characters like Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer so that kids will connect the food with the character or television show that they like” (23).

Let’s Practice Together Original passage from page 49 in the book Overweight

America, by Meryl Loonin: The food industry spends more than $12 billion each year on marketing aimed at persuading U.S. children to consume more food products. They hire consultants who specialize in devising clever ways to give these products maximum kid appeal.

Plagiarized: Food companies spend $12 billon every year to market their food products to children to persuade them to consume more. Food companies hire people to come up with ways to make the products appeal to kids.

What would a correct paraphrase or direct quote look like?

Let’s Practice—Your Turn Original passage from an online USA Today

article (no author listed) titled “Ban Food Marketing to Kids”: Advertisers bombard children with television commercials, in-school ads, product placement, brand licensing and sophisticated digital marketing. More than 100 studies confirm that it works.

Write a correct paraphrase:

Write a correct direct quote:

Feedback Using your cell phone, please respond to the

following polls about note taking and parenthetical citation.

Go to Poll Everywhere.

Strategies for Avoiding Plagiarism

Learn how to paraphrase and summarize text.

Use quotation marks around word-for-word passages.

Keep track of sources you use. Learn the correct MLA format for a “Works

Cited” page and use parenthetical citations in the body of your paper.

Get the paper started immediately and use your class time wisely. Don’t procrastinate.

Helpful WebsitesSeveral online resources are available on

the library home page and MS library blog to help you cite your sources both in your paper and in the Works Cited page. The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) can help

you format your work in a variety of ways.

EasyBib.com is another site that can help you format your work and create citations for a Works Cited page.

BibMe.org is similar to EasyBib and will create citations for you.

Works Cited

"Ban Food Marketing to Kids." USA Today 17 Oct. 2011. Student Research Center. Web. 4 Nov.

2011. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=n5h&AN=J0E294918671311&site=src-live>.

Loonin, Meryl. Overweight America. Detroit, MI: Lucent Books, 2007.

O’Connor, Frances. Obesity and the Media. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2009.