Dec 27 2008
Do You Make These Notetaking Mistakes?
Notetaking is an essential part of the content creation process. It is especially important when you need to distill a huge amount of information to be included and expanded in your content. The manner in which you take your notes will determine how smoothly your writing process will go. Most importantly, if you avoid the mistakes below, you’ll minimize uncertainty and time wasting during the writing process.
Mistake 1 :Taking Notes You’ll Not Be Using
The question is how you are to know what to make notes on? Everything you read seems important. Yes, everything is important, but you need only what’s important for your project.
If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll only make notes that you will use during writing. So, how are you to know what to look for? Easy. Just make an outline or plan. Or better still, come out with a list of questions to which you need answers. When you make notes, you only concentrate on information that answers your questions.
Mistake 2: Not Making Enough Notes
Sometimes in the interest of being concise in your notetaking you leave out important information that you should be using in your writing. Insufficient notes interrupt your writing. You have to put everything aside and spend time locating your source and adding more notes.
You may even have to spend time traveling if you have been making notes from a hard copy source stored in a library. Again you can avoid wasted time by having an outline and meeting the demands of the outline.
Mistake 3: Not Recording the Source of Your
Notes
Sometimes, in your overeagerness to capture information for your writing project, you overlook the importance of recording the source of your notes.
You may not want to include the source in your writing, but you may need to go back to the source to make additional notes.
Say for instance, you located a useful website from which you have been making notes and didn’t bother to note the URL If you need to go back there again for additional notes, you’ll be wasting time and energy trying to recall the website address and locate it.
So, you could do well to bookmark a website as soon as you find it useful. This will save you plenty of time if you need to revisit the website to look for additional information. You can always remove the bookmark as soon as you’re done with it.
