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The following explores ways to collect information for a technical writing project—the topic plastic pollution. This has become a big topic in the 2020s.
Brainstorm questions related to the topic
Take a look at the links McMurrey has collected the past few years (as of end of December 2024):
Plastic Pollution: Article Links
If you skim the titles, you can probably think of questions like these about plastic pollution:
what's the amount?
where it's located?
who's producing it?
what are its contents?
how harmful to living things?
what other dangers does it represent?
does it break down disappear?
can it be recycled?
are there alternatives to plastic pollution?
You probably can think of more questions.
Pick a question to write about
How would you collect notes on one or more of these questions? You could probably develop a decent technical document on just the question "what's the amount?" And that might include discussing what kind of stuff is in the plastic pollution. Also, the situation in which you write this document might demand that you discuss "who's producing all this plastic?" (One answer might be "who isn't?")
To simplify this task in order to focus on collecting information, use "Plastic Pollution: Article Links" above. How about focusing on the question "how much plastic pollution is there?"
Create a tentative outline
Make a list of subtopics relevant to the chosen topic "how much plastic pollution" is there?
where is it located?
what are the sources?
what are the contents?
where does it go?
If you are not able to do this with your topic, skim some of the information resources you have found. Even the ttles will give you good ideas.
Strategize how to collect information
The goal in collecting information for a writing project is to be able to use it, say, two months later when you've forgotten practically all of it.
Index-card method. Decades ago, the standard expected method was to summarize, paraphrase, or directly quote useful information onto index cards. It was assumed that all a writer need do was to transcribe the information on the complete set of index cards into a rough draft on regular paper, clean up the transitions a bit, and (boom!) the project would be done. To some members of generations of writers, including this one, this vision of the process has never seemed practical or realistic.
Photocopy method. When photocopying machines became widely available, photocopying pages relevant to a writing project became a common approach. Likely at that point, taking notes on index cards became obsolete. If you use the photocopy method, you highlight sentences and paragraphs in your photocopies that you think you can use in your researched technical document. If you have an outline, you tag what you've highlighted with number-letter combinations identifying it with specific parts of your outline.
Online method. Now that the Internet has become so pervasive, you can simply highlight and copy information directly off the screen and paste it into note files, saving you lots of nickels and dimes and giving the poor tired library photocopy machines a break. And nowi, you highlight sentences and paragraphs in your files that you think you can use in your researched technical document. If you have an outline, you tag what you've highlighted with number-letter combinations identifying it with specific parts of your outline.
True, some resources may not be online. If you decide a few of these resources are not hopelessly antiquated, head for the library with a bag of nickels and dimes. Also, some resources may be online but in an old PDF format that that cannot be selectively copied. Do a screen capture for those and resign yourself to transcribing the information manuallyi, or learn how use OCR (optical character recognition ) to convert the information to usable text.
Identify some potentially useful information sources
You may have gathered too many information resources that might have useful material for your writing project. That's a good thing. You don't want to rely on just one information resource—it may be all wrong, biased, or incomplete!
Let's say you've narrowed your resource list to the items below. Scan them to find specific information on the volume of plastic pollution. Click on a link to view details and a link to the complete article. Click again to close.
| 1 | On a Saturday last summer, I kayaked up a Connecticut river from the coast, buoyed by the rising tide, to pick up trash with a group of locals. Blue herons and white egrets hunted in the shallows. Ospreys soared overhead hauling freshly caught fish. The wind combed the water into fields of ripples, refracting the afternoon sun into a million diamonds. From our distance, the wetlands looked wild and pristine. See full article | {image} |
| 2 | A new study has found that, globally, micro- and nanoplastics and plastic additives are widespread across our food supply. While we have an understanding of how they get there, we don’t know a lot about their effects on human health, food safety and security. See full article |
| 3 | We know that marine animals of all sizes are inadvertently consuming plastics as they move through the ocean, but what does this diet look like for the largest of them all? To answer this question, scientists at Stanford University have analyzed the foraging habits of whales off the coast of California and found that blue whales take in an estimated 10 million pieces of plastic each day. See full article |
| 4 | No plastic is truly recyclable—not even the water bottles and milk jugs that people usually toss into their blue bins. According to a new report released on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a common industry standard for recyclability, even though they bear the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. See full article |
| 5 | Millions of metric tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year, but beyond that, we have little idea where much of it ultimately winds up. Researchers working to trace its path through the marine environment have discovered the highest concentration of microplastics ever recorded on the seafloor, an example of a hotspot of plastic pollution created by deep-sea currents that act like conveyor belts for our trash. See full article |
| 6 | The more we know about the problem of plastic pollution, the better we'll be able to intervene and clean up, or even prevent, the mess. That includes understanding the way it moves through the marine environment, and a new study has shed further light on this process through the use of tagged plastic bottles. The bottles were dropped in the Ganges river and some ended up thousands of kilometer away. See full article |
| 7 | No plastic is truly recyclable — not even the water bottles and milk jugs that people usually toss into their blue bins. According to a new report released on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a common industry standard for recyclability, even though they bear the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. See full article |
| 8 | A group of scientists studying the flow of plastic into the ocean have found a startling amount of pollution exiting South Asia's largest river systems. The scientists calculated that the Ganges and two nearby waterways are responsible for pumping as much as three billion microplastic particles into the Indian Ocean each day. The study was conducted as part of National Geographic's Sea to Source project, which aims to tackle the problem of plastic pollution by investigating how it can be prevented from reaching the ocean. In December, scientists working on this project published research detailing just how far tagged plastic bottles can travel along the Ganges river, washiing thousands of kilometers downstream into the Indian Ocean. See fullarticle |
| 9 | With its production continuing to increase at an exponential rate, our problem with plastic pollution is showing no sign of slowing down. A new study mapping mapping the movement of plastic waste has outlined just how drastic the situation might become, projecting that 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic will be dumped on land and in the oceans by 2040 unless some significant steps are taken to address the trend. See full article |
| 10 | For thousands of years humans have existed on Earth, but it is only in the last 100 or so that plastics have entered our lives. These days you can barely go a minute without touching something made from some kind of plastic. But while we've been getting all swept up in the convenience that synthetic polymers bring us, the trash has been piling up. Millions of metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year, and no one really knows where it is and what damage it is causing. So ... what are we to do about it? See full article |
Track down useful information in your sources
Imagine the excerpt in source 10 above catches your attention, you link to the full article (https://newatlas.com/plastic-ocean-cleanup/50277/), and then scroll to this paragraph:
In 2015, a paper published in the journal Science estimated that somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. The researchers arrived at this figure after estimating how much plastic waste every coastal country in the world produces, and then calculated how much could wash into the sea from open dumps and improperly secured landfills. The scientists guess that this amounts to between 15 to 40 percent of all disposed plastic.
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Now, wanting details, you click the 2015 link and find a more informative article in the journal Science:
Estimates of the mass of plastic waste carried by particular waterways range from <<1 kg per day (Hilo, HI) to 4.2 MT (4200 kg) per day (Danube River) (10, 11). Because of their dependence on local watershed characteristics, these results cannot be easily extrapolated to a global scale.
Read entire excerpt |
Create an extended-summary note; add the sources to your bibliographic list
You believe that your readers, being skeptical types, will be curious how the estimates of total plastic pollution were achieved, but not to the extent of reading the entire excerpt or even a paraphrase of it. So you decide to summarize the information:
{summary}
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Notice in the summary note above, an all-important bibliographic identifier—information about the authors, book or journal, dates, pages has been added.
Updating the outline
As you take notes, you must regularly update the locators on all your notecards because as you read, take notes, and learn more about your technical subject, your outline may either change or become more specific. Imagine that you started with this excerpt of a rough outline and had taken these notecards:
In 2015, a paper published in the journal Science estimated that somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. The researchers arrived at this figure after estimating how much plastic waste every coastal country in the world produces, and then calculated how much could wash into the sea from open dumps and improperly secured landfills. The scientists guess that this amounts to between 15 to 40 percent of all disposed plastic.
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Figure 11. Notecards and the corresponding outline before updating
As you took these notecards, you would update your outline periodically; at the end, the outline might look like this:
Revised outline |
Figure 12. Updated outline
Notice...
If you had taken these notes and updated your outline, you would revise the locators on the individual notecards like this:
Figure 13. Revised locators
Remember that if you don't like the number-combinations as locators, you can substitute short phrases, as is shown in the alternate locators above.
Final stages in the notetaking process
As you take notes, check off sections of your outline for which you gather sufficient information, as is done in this outline excerpt. In this example, the writer has taken sufficient notes for much of IV.B. but still needs information for the rest of the outline.
Figure 14. An outline for which note-taking is partially complete
In the final step in notetaking, you arrange the notecards in the order that you'll use them as you write the rough draft. Read through your cards several times to make sure the sequence is right and that there are no gaps in the information you've gathered. When you're sure that the order is right, write sequence numbers on each of the cards to preserve the order (see the sequence numbers on the notecards in the next section). With the notecards in the right order and numbered, you are ready to write the first draft, which is discussed in the section on rough drafting.
Other systems of notetaking
There are plenty of other ways to take notes. The main point of any form of note-taking of course is to make your technical document work easier and less time-consuming. You may prefer some other note-taking system because of your own work style or because of your technical document project. Or, you may end up using some other system in combination with the traditional one. Any system that enables you to get your work done efficiently is a good one.
- Mental notetaking. With short technical documents, it is possible to remember all the information and not writing any of it down is possible. But few of us are able to remember all of the information for long, highly technical technical documents.
- Book marks. If you use only a few articles or books, you can mark the important passages with slips of paper and write the rough draft with them. If you have many books and articles, this approach can get to be quite chaotic.
- Exploratory drafts. If you are already familiar with your technical document subject, you can try writing a rough skeletal draft to show you what information you need. You may discover that all you lack is specific names, statistics, or terminology. You can take notes and plug the information into the draft (especially if you have computerized word processing). Writing the exploratory draft shows you what you know and don't know.
- Notetaking by the source. If you have only a few sources, you can also use one other fairly common system of notetaking:
- You take notes from individual sources onto long sheets of paper rather than onto notecards.
- You take all the information you need from the source onto as many sheets of paper as necessary; you don't split it up into bits of information on separate notecards.
- At the top of each notesheet, you give full bibliographic information on the book or article.
- Throughout each notesheet, you indicate the exact pages the information comes from.
- Also, you label these pages of notes with locators, the letter-number combinations from the outline.
- You mark off sections of the outline as you gather sufficient information for them.
- In some cases, you can cut up these full-page notes and actually handle them as if they were notecards.
Here is an example sheet of notes using this approach:
Figure 15. Sample notesheet: taking notes by the source
In this system, the source (book, article, technical document, etc.) is indicated at the top of the page; the page numbers are indicated down the right margin in parentheses; and the sheet of notes is keyed to the outline down the left margin in parentheses.
Electronic Note-Taking Methods
As of 2015, the writing-teaching world—at least at the college level and in terms of textbooks—is seriously behind in terms of what it knows and what it teaches about note-taking for major writing projects. Strangely, the very best writing resource on the Internet, the Purdue OWL, has nothing on note-taking. Read the following section Traditional Note-Taking Methods for a review of just what good any note-taking system is.
Until we get our act together, consider how the traditional note-taking system is implemented in software applications.
A particulary good tutorial on the traditional note-taking method has been developed at Bonita Springs Middle Language Arts Department. You can go download it here: How to Organize a Research Paper using Notecards. Makes you want to write a research paper!
A number of software applications are available that support note-taking and related tasks: Evernote, EasyBib, NoodleTools, and more. Their basic functions are similar so let's use NoodleTools. It has a nice set of YouTube videos that walk you through the main phases of its use:
How do I create a new project? This video takes you from the very start!
NoodleTools—Creating Outlines. If you've created good notecards, creating the outline from them is terrific, as this video shows.
Noodle Tools Works Cited. If you've created good notecards, creating the bibliography from them is also terrific.
I would appreciate your thoughts, reactions, criticism regarding this chapter: your response—David McMurrey.
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