A great way to keep your thoughts together and organized is to create an outline.
There are many ways to go about this. One method that you could use is to start with the sources you intend to use. First use the URL links or name of the article (eventually it will be changed to the citation) as the first heading, then a summary, and finally quotes that stand out to you or the subject. This is a simple way keep track of the sources before you have fully developed a thesis for the essay.
Example: I. Vickery, Hester Styles. “‘How Interesting He Looks in Dying’: John Keats and Consumption.” Keats-Shelley Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Apr. 2018, pp. 58–63. EBSCOhost, doi.org/10.1080/09524142.2018.1460954.
1. This article is about the effect John Keats had on consumption as well as the effect tuberculosis had on Keats. Vickery delves into the cultural image and mythos surrounding TB, and how Keats helped shape the idea that consumption is the artist’s disease. Vickery continues with a close reading of Keats’s poetry, specifically pulling out the imagery of TB that is found throughout his writing. The article ends with a very beautiful line: “John Keats’s poetry contends, to the very last, that nature, art and people are made interesting by living, and necessarily living subject to decay, to disease and to mortality.”
a. “It is hard to argue that Keats’s tuberculosis and early death did not make him a more compelling cultural figure" (59).
Once there is a full thesis developed (see Writing), the quotes then get rearranged into the categories stated in the thesis.
Keeping track of everything can be overwhelming, especially for larger projects.
There are multiple ways to sort everything. Here are a few examples:
1. Folders in Google Drive
2. Outlines
3. Google Sheets/ Excel
4. Google Slides/ PowerPoint
5. The save function in OMNIA, Ebsco, ProjectMUSE, and other databases.