Take a little time away from your notes page, perhaps a day or two. You need to time to process. So this is yet another reason to start early.
Now look over them critically.
Remember, think critically about this.
If you don't think you'll use a certain quote, delete it from your document. (That step has already been done in the enclosed examples).
I often like more notes than necessary to give me enough wiggle room, but its up to you what you would like to do.
Sometimes you're asked to write an outline before you do a stitch of research. But if you're allowed to form your paper more organically, you may have your topic, begin researching, read/scan/skim your sources, take your notes, take your break, then delete some of the more useless notes. Then you ask, now what? How do I get the paper going from this disorganized mess? I know I need to organize it a bit!
This is when you look through your notes, read them and write down a word or two about the topic of each quote. If the topic of each quote repeats, then put a tally mark next to that topic. Repeat and you'll have a list of topics. This also sort of helps when you're writing so you have a better understanding of what that note was about in order to write your paraphrases better.
Now, let's figure out which of the quotes I wrote down work together in themes so we can know how to structure the paper.
The Themes I found: Number of quotes I have on the topic
It's never really a good idea to have anything more than three or four major topics. So these fifteen themes can be grouped together into larger topics which will form the major parts of your paper. Think of your paper as a spine and other bones. The spinal cord (which is part of your life force) is the thesis. Each of the major topics is a vertebrae that protects the spinal cord (as a topic "protects" your thesis). These minor subtopics are supporting bones that are depend on yet support the vertebrae.
So let's group these fifteen themes together.
These four major topics are your outline now and will be the major points in the paper.
This is something you can do. Look through your notes and find subtopics within them. Figure out which can be grouped together and those major groups will form the basis of your papers' major points.
Let's go back to the notes page and on the basis of your MAJOR thematic groupings, you may want to color code the quotes by theme.
For my purposes
This will signal to me, while I'm off doing the drafting process, what quotes you have to work with and when.
If, and only if, you have time, you may want to take all of those quotes and recopy them and paste them by group. It may seem exhaustive, but it’s worth it in the long run so you can see what quotes are repetitive. I know already that I have at least five or six quotes already on the presence and popularity of the alt.tv.twinpeaks Usnet group back when the first two seasons were going on. So those five could be synthesized in a way, you'll learn what synthesizing means in the drafting process. You may also want to further whittle down what really won’t work in your paper at this point as well.
Also, recopying it also allows you to figure out how many paragraphs you have per section. You could even further subdivide sections if necessary.
You can also format the quotes to MLA in text citation in order to ease the writing process.
In order to have some brevity as writing the entire thing in the drafting process, I am only going to concentrate on the "Fandom" section of the paper, so the enclosed divided notes sections will reflect that.
Now for the sake of thoroughness have two documents below.
Taking another step back helps. This time, perhaps sleep on it, then go back and reassess your quotes and determine if the areas work for you. I went back and determined that my fandom section was WAY too granular. So instead of dividing it topically I decided for a little more of a chronological approach.
Now for time's sake, I'm not going to regroup these.
This however, goes to show that reassessing is an important part of writing and crafting a research paper. Sometimes your original flow or your uber-large topic doesn't quite work, so having to reassess is okay.
You may want to set a few milestone reassessment points at perhaps these phases:
Now if I were writing a whole paper with all of my topics and subtopics, this is what it will look like.