I feel lucky to start doing some rudimentary research early — from my first year in high school. Over the years, I have written around ten research essays on various topics in both college and high school, including visual art comparative studies, business reports, scientific articles, and so on. Initially, I took notes on paper while reading the articles and later started using Concepts. After note-taking, I usually consolidate these notes into interconnected streams of ideas and try to either formulate my central claim, adjust my main claim, or support my main claim. Then the different “streams” will formulate or be assigned under different subtitles to formulate a draft of the essay. The sole focus on ideas and takeaways caused one serious problem in the later stages of essay writing, and I will take about that later in this response. 

​

I agree when college librarian Barbara Fister says, “very few of those articles are written in such a way that a non-expert … can grasp the main point without a lot of work” (Fister) in the article “Burke’s Parlor Tricks: Introducing Research as Conversation.” When I first started to do research several years ago, the excitement of learning something new (and doing research itself) was quickly replaced by the frustration of sorting out credible and efficient resources. The internet is a powerful tool to help us browse for knowledge, but at the same time can cause an “overflow” of knowledge and overwhelm rookie researchers. Luckily, starting to do research early helped me practice. 

​

I plan to use Zotero as the main software to track all resources I have used and use Concept to draw connections between ideas. Additionally, I plan to keep all my resources in MLA works cited format within one Pages document with all the takeaways listed as bullet points. My high school essays taught me this tough lesson: when consolidating final drafts, I lost the connections between quotes, ideas, and concepts and the reference articles — I have all the resources I have used listed under the works cited page, but I forgot the specific idea I included in from which of them. I had to spend a long time re-reading all of them and infer the corresponding one.