Noodle – Rough Draft
Updated 11/2009
It takes a few steps and alot of copying and pasting, but you do not have to retype your paper if you’ve typed all your notecards into Noodle.
To just go ahead and print your notecards because you want to retype everything into your paper (and that’s fine if you want to retype everything, it is YOUR paper after all!):
Click the “print” link located between the “delete” and “tag” buttons.
Choose “export to Word (rtf)” and submit
Export ALL notecards and submit
Choose OPEN and then you can print your notecards.
There’s your notecards. They are in the order you placed them in, so make sure you put your notecards in order BEFORE you print them out or save them as a file. If you have not done that, stop, go back and create “piles” of notecards and put each pile in order. See the earlier post on creating piles of notecards.
To save your notecards to a Word document so you can just copy and paste everything over into your rough draft and NOT have to retype the notes:
Click the “print” link located between the “delete” and “tag” buttons.
Choose “export to Word (rtf)” and submit
Export ALL notecards and submit
Choose SAVE – NOT open. Remember WHERE you’re saving the file and name it something like notecards_2009 and then click save.
If you’re given the option to click open once you save the file, go ahead and open. If you don’t see that option, just open Word and open the file you just saved.
There’s your notecards. They are in the order you placed them in, so make sure you put your notecards in order BEFORE you print them out or save them as a file. If you have not done that, stop, go back and create “piles” of notecards and put each pile in order. See the earlier post on creating piles of notecards.
- Edit, select all
- Format, font, Times New Roman 12 or whatever is required for your paper
- Format, paragraph, line spacing, double
- Format, bulleting, choose the second option
- Format, bulleting, choose “none”
These changes will make copying and pasting your notecards into your paper much easier.
Now, keep going . . .
To actually copy and paste your notes into your rough draft:
- What you have open is a file named notecards (or something similar.) Now we want to save that same file AS YOUR ROUGH DRAFT. No, I am not crazy. Go to file, save as, and name this your rough draft. Trust me.
- You must cite your sources within the body of your paper. It’s a really good thing if you’ve already put your parenthetical references on your notecards – you’ve already cited your sources! YAY!!! …
If you haven’t done this already, you will need to cite each source within a paragraph BEFORE switching to another source. For example, if sentence 1 & 2 were taken from source A, then at the end of sentence 2 don’t put a period. Space once after the last word of sentence 2 and in parentheses cite that source. Put the period after the parentheses. On to sentences 3, 4, & 5 of that same paragraph. These came from source B. Do the same thing. At the end of sentence 5 don’t put a period. Space once after the last word of sentence 5 and in parentheses cite that source. Put a period after the parentheses.
3. What I recommend you do is to CUT or DELETE all the stuff you don’t need. Take it away. Trash it. Delete it off your document. What you’re working from IS your notecards, but at this point you have cited your sources AND you have your notecards in the order you want them. Take out all the titles, subheadings, source citations – NOT your parenthetical references at the end of your notes. Take out the word “source” and the entry immediately following the word source. See? Look at your notes and you’ll see what I’m referring to. Don’t shake your head. Look at your notes and reread this #3.
I highly recommend that you hit the save button regularly throughout your copying process!
Combine your notes into paragraphs using the backspace key (duh) and create new paragraphs where needed.
Once you’re done deleting all the junk, make sure you hit save, read your paper and add in transitional words or phrases to make the paper flow. Look at where you’ve citied your sources within a paragraph. Did you do all of that correctly? Remember that you only stop and cite a source within a paragraph when you are CHANGING sources.
If you used two notecards from the same source back to back in the same paragraph and the parenthetical reference is the same, you need only to incude that citation at the end of the second notecard. That’s because you’re in the same paragraph and the parenthetical reference is the exact same.
Go. Make it so.
