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When printing out a document, one can commonly choose whether the printer will collate, printing complete copies of multi-page documents sequentially, or not collate, printing all the desired copies of the first page before printing the second page, and so on.Īnother, less common, use of the word collate is exhibited in religious contexts. One can, for instance, collate the pages of a book before it is bound, as well as collate the organization of a bibliography alphabetically or in accordance with citation numbering. The organizational scheme is usually one that is intuitive to humans, like chronological or alphabetical orders. Once you properly collate all this data, then you can choose the most salient points and start constructing your final product, whether a paper, presentation, or debate notes, to apply what you've learned.Īnother usage for the word collate is to order them in some practical arrangement.
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Without collating what you've found, you may have your collection of facts - bookmarked webpages, dog-eared books, and pages of notes - but you haven't yet arranged them in a way that lets you process the knowledge they contain or weigh individual facts against one another. To collate is to assemble or gather information in order to more efficiently and effectively conduct further analysis and compare individual sources. But before you can hope to make sense of the considerable amount of information you've found, you'll need to put it all together in a logical manner, i.e. After poring over dozens of books, taking copious notes, and browsing several websites, you've finally collected all the facts you need. Whatever the topic of research, a trip to the library to dredge up the facts is unavoidable. Maybe you are comparing a piece of contemporary Irish literature to the country's political history, or maybe you are doing a medical analysis on the common causes of cancer. At some point in our studies, there comes a point when we are tasked with writing a research paper.
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