Informational Writing Session 3Note-Taking and Idea-Making for

RevisionWriters I want to tell you something. Many famous writers are totally obsessed with their writing tools. Sometimes the paper you write can actually make you write more or less, write better or worse.

Today we are going to work on further organizing our work. Cutting apart your draft, giving different pages of your notebook over to different subtopics. You need to lay out your materials so you are ready to revise the flash-draft you’ve written.

Tips on Note-Taking

•Read a section of a text, pause to think about what is important, and the write your notes

•Consider the main ideas and supporting details as you read. A structure like boxes and bullets can help you to organize your notes.

•Instead of copying from the text, try to put the information in your own words. (If this is hard, don’t look at the original text when recording notes.)

•Keep track of your source so you can return to confirm or get more information.

**When you are reading nonfiction texts, it helps to pause after a big chunk of reading, when your head is totally full, to rethink what you have learned? That pause time can be a time to recall and hold onto and organize what you have just learned.

Mrs. Warner will demonstrate now.

So researchers, try to grow your ideas. Push your self to see questions or patterns. Ask yourself a question about something you find and then answer that question. When you find yourself thinking something, jot it down, fast and furious.

You need to push yourself. Your goal is not to write sentences of thought, but paragraphs of thought. Try using phrases like, I wonder if …or Perhaps…

LINK

So researchers, to give yourself space for continuing to research and think about each of the section of your reports, you’ll probably want to cut apart your flash-draft and tape sections to blank pages of report, making white space around each of your subtopics. Then you can continue researching each of those subtopics.

Information Writers

• Think about the topic-and the parts of the topic-to write about.

• Plan how the writing might go• Research, taking notes• Draft• Revise with various lenses: growing ideas,

looking for patterns, and asking questions