Skip to Main Content

Catherine McAuley College: Organising

Welcome to your digital library

Organising

Organising: How can I best use the information? Have I enough information for my assignment? Do I need to use all this information? How can I best combine the information from all the sources?

This is my first draft!

Help is here!

Plagiarism

Check out our plagiarism libguide! The last thing you want to happen is get to the evaluation step and have to admit "I copied it from the internet!"

Bibliographies

At this stage of collecting notes and looking through resources you should be keeping a list of what resources you are using. There are a number of ways to do this.  Check out the libguide page on how to construct your bibliography or annotated bibliography

You can use the Resources section of word to compile your bibliography or the following free bibliography generators

Bibme

Cite this for me

Easybib

Organising

Whether your source of information is from a book, a person or online you need to be able to make notes. 

  • Use your questions and keywords from step one to help focus your notes.
  • Ask yourself "Have I all the relevant resources?"
  • Ask yourself "Have I enough information", if not you may need top go back to the locating or selecting steps
  • Makes notes only about what to need to know and remember
  • Think of the format that your final piece will be taking to help organise your notes
  • Make up headings, use dot points
  • Think about you will how you will reconstruct the information you have found
  • Keep your bibliography and reference list up to date

Making notes

Note-taking tips

Note-taking helps you remember what you've read. In fact, a good set of notes can be the foundation for your assignment. Use the tips below to help you get started.

As a general rule it's best to:

  • read the text first to get the gist of it, then start taking notes on the second read
  • only record information that relates to your assignment question
  • use headings in your notes, so they're easier to skim through later
  • use dot points instead of full sentences and keep them short – one or two sentences is fine
  • use abbreviations or your own symbols for common words.

When you're taking notes:

  • summarise sections of the text in a few dot points, without looking at the text
  • note important dates, events, people and places and copy the spelling correctly
  • collect quotes to use later
  • record the bibliographical details of all the references you use in your notes
  • look up any words you don't understand and record definitions in your notes.
Your own ideas are important, so record them in your notes along with the information from your resources.

Graphic Organisers

Definition of a Graphic Organiser

A graphic organiser is a visual display that demonstrates relationships between facts, concepts or ideas. A graphic organiser guides the learner’s thinking as they fill in and build upon a visual map or diagram. They are also informally used as a term to describe all visual learning strategies such as concept mapping, webbing, mind mapping, and more.

There are endless designs for graphic organisers. Your teacher will probably direct you to some that they use or suggest such as the electronic mindmapping tool "Inspiration".

Use the free site Freeology to find some more examples of graphic orgaisers