<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>I'm a 3rd year university (social work) student and I write a lot of APA papers. To say that essays take me forever is an understatement. What takes so long is incorporating course readings/sources into my paper. </p>
<p>Basically, I read all the course readings. Decide the topic of my paper and roughly what my main points will be. Go back through all readings to find evidence to support these topics (which takes forever). Come up with a rough outline. Inevitably make a million changes to the outline/decide on new topics or themes I want to talk about and, again, go back through all the readings to find evidence. </p>
<p>Then I remember some really awesome term/theme/idea that I read about in one of my sources, but can't remember which source, so end up going BACK through them to find this obscure idea. </p>
<p>This cycle seems to happen hundreds of times. My last 12 page paper took me nearly 2 months to write. I'm not slow at the actual writing, it's just having to incorporate all these sources and the time required to go back through them so many times that gets me. </p>
<p>Does anyone have any ideas of how I can improve this process? It's so time consuming and any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.</p>
<p>I took great notes while I was reading - it takes more time on the front-end but makes it much easier later when you’re trying to write a paper. </p>
<p>I realize note cards seem very antiquated but writing notes forces you to boil things down to the salient point and also you’ll have better recall later as you start to think about what you want to write. If I really liked a particular quote I would write it down word-for-word with page reference. For me the index cards helped me “chunk” the information together in a way that worked well. It was especially helpful as I used the notes to organize my paper. I would go through with colored highlighter to pick the points I wanted to include, then arrange the cards in different order to test how I wanted to organize the paper before I even made an outline. </p>
<p>The other thing is my personal philosophy about writing a great paper is you have to find not just evidence to support your thesis: you have to find the very best evidence to use in your argument. By taking copious notes you can quickly scan them and evaluate the relative strengths of each point before you start writing, so you don’t find yourself in the middle of your paper wanting to go back and find some awesome thing that you just remembered. </p>
<p>Everyone is different and probably needs to experiment to find systems that work for their own style - but hopefully some of these ideas will help! </p>
<p>Thanks Mondut! I don’t usually take notes because it’s time consuming and I don’t need them for exams, but maybe I’ll have to start doing that and using highlighters. It sounds like it would be helpful in terms of organizing ideas and remembering the main themes of sources. Thanks!</p>