my first paper

I've now written my first paper after reading on the Kindle.

My major textbooks come as PDF documents from the publisher.  These are typically anthologies, and we read selections of the book.  We all know how fun it is to read a PDF - at least I've got the big screen!  So I put the whole PDF document on the Kindle.  Then I'm covered for anything they throw at me in class.  But the things we are supposed to read.... Well, I can copy and past from the PDF, so I make documents I can convert to real Kindle format.  And I'm finally getting that down to a science.

So, I do most of my reading in the kindle format, of stuff I copy out of the PDF.  And that's where things get funky.  But here's what I've learned.  Leave the page number in when copying from PDF to Word (or whatever you make kindle documents from).

When I highlight something, if I plan to make a note, or just highlight it, I type the page number closest to it.  Why?  Because my profs expect me to be able to cite page numbers when I write my papers.

So on this paper, I had highlighted things in My Clippings that I used for my paper.  Sometimes I had a note too of what I found good about it.  But when I opened this clippings file to work on my paper, I had great quotes, but no page numbers.  Not a huge problem, just a bit of a time spent tracking info down.

In books where there aren't page numbers - like my Great Gatsby and Sun Also Rises, I think I'll have to put in chapter numbers and let it go at that.  I wonder how the MLA citation format will work for that?  It's an electronic source, but it's not.... Hmmm. Something to think about.