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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43737
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43737
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

"Write and cite" is good practice that you should start getting accustomed to early on. The longer the piece you write, the more sources you would have to juggle. Now, imagine there are twenty articles you would be citing, four of them say something relevant to the point you're making in one single paragraph. Working by "write first, cite later", you'd need to meticulously go over those four articles (if you remember which four those were - otherwise it's all the twenty), to find which article said which particular thing you're referring to. Repeat for each and every paragraph. That's _a lot_ of work. Now imagine you're writing your thesis, citing several hundred sources. "Write first" becomes impossible. Don't forget that _every_ piece of information and every idea you gleaned from somewhere needs to be cited. And as @DPT states, a large part of your writing would be looking back at the existing literature.

Forget writing a complete piece in one sitting. You won't write even your thesis proposal, let alone your thesis, in one sitting. There's way too much research into existing literature that you'd need to do. And since you don't write everything all at once, things bleed into each other, you don't always remember which article a particular idea came from. So if you don't cite at once, you have to go looking for it all over again.

I find it useful to summarise each source as I read it, copy out the ideas I will need to refer to later, and attach a citation to that. This process also helps me arrange everything in my head. But more relevant to your question, when I come to actually writing whatever it is I'm writing, I can copy-paste the already-formatted citation from the pre-made page, instead of breaking my chain of thought to find the relevant information for the citation manager.

Original score: 3