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The Book of Quotes

If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll be very aware that I’ve been poking and prodding at you to do something about all of those papers you’ll no doubt have to write this quarter/semester in pursuit of your degree. All of the outside things are easy: talk to a professor, do research, something else, turn in your finished paper. What is that “something else” that gets you from research to a finished paper? Well, as many hilarious (and accurate) internet graphs/comics will tell you, the process of writing is anything but linear for most of us. You don’t just “pick a topic” and then “do research” and then “sit at a keyboard and write a draft” and then “revise the draft” and then “turn it in.” While things may generally go in that order, you’re likely to do research while writing and revising and editing (in fact, if you pick a really great topic you’ll probably keep researching long after you’ve turned in that paper of yours). How might you go about getting from the beginning to the end?

One of the things I’ve found extremely helpful over the years has been what I call the “quote sheet.” Instead of taking laborious notes while researching (well, okay, I do that sometimes too), I keep a short list of quotes that I think I’d like to use in order to further my point on a piece of paper (and eventually a plain text file). This list includes the citation style I would normally use for my writing (in my case MLA). Then, when I go to write the paper, I have a great list of quotes that support, deepen, or challenge my thesis to employ while writing the paper. This serves as sort of a short-list to remind me of the topics I’ve researched as well as helpful synopsis of a major point in each work. If you haven’t done something like this in the past: give it a try. It has become my default behavior for writing papers. Perhaps it could also be yours.