for the love of dorkiness

Today I worked on my research for one of my doctoral papers and I got immense enjoyment out of the organizational scheme I came up with. So if you can handle the dorkiness that is about to ensue, please read on.

You might find this helpful or you might find this sickening...

I started with a huge stack of book and articles on multicultural education.

Disclaimer: I have a serious problem/obsession ordering books from amazon.de with my amazon prime shipping.

It's getting ugly.

As I read, (I have been working on getting through these texts for quite some time now), I used this handidandy highlighter, which doubles as a sticky flag dispenser.

Whoever invented that was a super smartypants!

Today, I went through the documents and typed up the important quotes/ideas that I highlighted which I think will be good to include in my paper. I typed them into a word document formatted with 2" X 4" labels and then printed them out. For each quote, I included the author's name at the bottom and/or the other researcher(s) that were being quoted and the page number from the original source. I will have to go and locate primary sources, so it's important to write down all that good stuff.

how do you like that quote teacher friends??

Once they were printed out, I cut them apart and sorted them by theme, which will become the different sub sections of my paper. You might be thinking that labels are expensive, which they are, and that using labels is a waste, which is probably is. I wanted to use index cards, but I didn't have any. I suppose I could have run on down to the grocery store, but I had to be home to receive my package from amazon.de. ( I know...it's a problem....but if I am not home, then I have to walk all the way to the post office the next day to get my book and that definitely puts a damper on the awesomeness of the overnight delivery) I also figured it would be easier, and faster, to type the quotes rather than write them out by hand. I also liked the fact that I could stick the labels onto something rather than having loose cards.

Once I got the labels cut and sorted, I stuck them onto file folders and labeled the folders with the appropriate theme or idea that corresponded with the quotes and will correspond with the sections of the paper.

Now I have 4 colorful folders that each contain information for a different section of the paper. When I being the actual writing process, I will not need to keep flipping through various articles hunting for the information and quotes that I need because it's all nice

and organized in my folders.

Ta-Da!

So if you made it to the end of this post without gagging, then hopefully you are like me in that you appreciate a good organizational, timesaving system.

Thoughts?