So you have finished your research, gathered the books, journal articles and primary research material for your essay/dissertation/thesis and now have to start turning this into your text and argument. You are faced by a mass of research on one side and a blank piece of paper on the other. How do you convert one into the other?

For an essay you may be faced by converting 1,000,000 words into 3,000 words and this gearing ratio will only become worse with a dissertation or thesis. This process is known as the "Writing Cycle"

On one side you have your research and on the other your text. As you come to write the next new paragraph, you turn to your research to find one or two quotes/citations to support that paragraph and then turn back to the text the complete your new paragraph. What slows the "Writing Cycle" is the friction of matching your research sources with the text of your next paragraph. The engine that drives the "Writing Cycle" are your Notes.

You can create your Notes at any point, but ideally when you have at least an outline of your project's structure, so that the thematic scheme of the Notes reflects the text. The Notes should consist of a single line of descriptive text and the source reference to give a clear signpost to the source. Using the thematic structure, you can review all the sources for the next section of writing and then use the relevant Signpost for each new paragraph to provide the relevant citation.

It is probably easier to create your Notes in a digital note taking app such as Microsoft OneNote or EverNote as this will give you flexibility to reorganise your thematic structure as it evolves during your writing.

The traditional form of note taking was to summarise the subject and write a reference, the issue with this method is that you can end up with thousands of words of 'notes' whereas using Signposts you should end up with one to two hundred lines which can then be reduced down to 30-50 paragraph citations.

You can go a long way to helping the "Writing Cycle" to turn by organising your research materials into some sort of thematic order as you conduct your research. Collect all the books together, and mark items of interest with arrow markers. Print off and file the journal articles and do the same with any other research materials. File and arrange them with dividers using a thematic scheme. For research written into a workbook during an archive visit, devise an index system. The most efficient scheme would be your essay structure and its section headings. However since it is likely that your research started well before your essay planning, a good compromise would be to use any applicable thematic scheme.

For small projects such as an essay, keeping a simple spreadsheet as a catalogue is worthwhile, or old school index cards and shoebox, but for larger projects a citation manager such as RefWorks or Zotero will be worth the extra effort. These will allow you to build a similar folder structure to your essay and fill it with relevant sources as you go along.

The "Writing Cycle" works by starting a new paragraph in your text, finding the relevant section in your Notes which gives citations which might be of interest. Then you turn to your sources and find those potential citations using the indexing. The hard work put into all that indexing now pays off, with the ease with which you can find the citation. A recommendation to help keep the writing flow, is to tackle re-reading and consulting the references section by section, rather than by each paragraph and then use the Notes as an aide-memoire for each paragraph.

Converting potentially millions of words into just a few thousand is always going to take some hard work yet anything that you can do to help the "Writing Cycle" turn more easily, is an investment that will be repaid during the time that you are writing.

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