Note-taking should be its own subject in schools. As your piece implies, taking notes is just another way of saying "critical thinking" and it is a skill that so many of us lack.
Every day I write down a few quotes from something I read that stood out for me. I also write down 7 things I saw or noticed during the day. I also write down, in narrative form as you mention, the things memorable from that day. These are my ways of actively engaging with the material of my life. Thank you for your newsletter. I'm glad I'm not the only person who writes notes and marginalia...😊
This is part of what I love about blogging/substack culture. My various blogs have acted as a commonplace book (complete with tagging system) and a prompt to always consider at the end of reading something interesting: do I want to actively noodle on this for a bit?
The practice reminds me of this advice from the title figure of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler:
"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow."
Yes, I can attest to the value of "incubation" of ideas. Sometimes you have to let what you already have on deck swirl around and marinate in brain, heart and soul.
Very difficult, but different strokes for different folks. Personally I found taking notes to distract from really listening. I'd see other students frantic about trying to jot down stuff the lecturer was saying, but then I'd get the highest grade in the class. But I also came prepared, I'd already read the material so hearing what the professor thought was important wasn't my first exposure to the material. I also never gave a bleep about learning for the test. I figured if I just did my best to master the material, the results would follow. They almost did, except for a few subjective lecturers who didn't want original thinking so much as their own takes regurgitated. I was a bioengineering major at Columbia and learned to loathe some of the renowned "liberal arts" professors like one Dennis Dalton whose audiotapes were available through those airline magazine ads 30 years ago. Go figure, I read all the books by and about Karl Marx and Hitler (y's) and those who just repeated what he wanted to hear without bothering to read classic works got better grades. Maybe that's why more bridges don't fall down while our society and zeitgeist are hot messes. Anyway point being that while note taking has its advantages, I find the multitasking a bit counterproductive. In med school we had a volunteer transcription service. Cost like 250 a term, someone would record and then transcribe the lecture word for word. If you transcribed four of them or so you didn't have to pay the 250. Read the material, go to the lectures (only for the good professors, I learned which were a waste of time), then read the transcript notes when they came out a few days later. Now that was the best of both worlds, and I don't recall anyone who didn't pay for the service and went to class taking their own notes. And damn I'm good at multitasking, but sometimes I think (maybe always?) there are times when one shouldn't and should focus 100% on the task at hand.
Also though, there's something essential about writing shit down. Something in the brain where the writing just engraves it in the memory. Hard to memorize a poem? Try writing it out slowly, then writing it again. Even better than typing. It's been studied, something about the writing literally helps your brain lock it in better. We used to write down phone numbers and redial them and after a few calls you knew the number by heart. Now you just enter it right into your dumbphone and can't remember any phone numbers by heart.
I'm having problems remembering music pieces, doesn't matter how many times I play them. Was never my strength but I did play piano concertos and such without needing to look at the music. In other ways my memory is better than ever. There are different kinds, and our brain is a mystery.
I always found reading ahead a way to come in with a prepared mind. Even if I understood the reading, the lecture would make things clearer and easier to remember.
100%, never understood those who thought attending the class would make up for a lack of preparation beforehand. I went to a damn good high school where nobody ever seemed unprepared. Gave me good habits for college and med school. Never fall behind and everything kind of takes care of itself. The students walking around in a panic a week or two before exams always mystified me. I went in like a boxer confident in his training. Music is a great example, you don't practice and the lesson with the teacher is a waste of time. Tangentially I don't understand how kids go to school for 6-8 hours a day and don't learn anything, like that's their goal. Seems like a lot of energy expended to not improve yourself when you're already stuck there.
Great thoughts! I've always considered it important to write thoughts down if you want to remember what you got out of a book years later, but never thought about doing it for anything else.
I started today by writing a 3 paragraph summary and reflection on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which I watched over the weekend. I thought I'd feel silly at first, but as I found myself unable to recall all the details until I wrote out my summary point-by-point (even cheating a little with a wikipedia summary on specific details like character names), I can conclude that I now have a far better grip on the film's plot and characters. I'm confident I could have a basic discussion about the film and will retain the details more effectively than I would have. It's not a movie I would have considered worth summarizing and reflecting on beforehand, but I'm glad Ted prompted me to give it a try. I'm pleasantly surprised concerning the value I now see in doing it.
I think I'll give this a try with music too and see what I can come up with.
Started doing this when a friend initiated a film club in March 2020 (yeah, enforced shutin-ism). Nothing handwritten, but plenty of background reading/viewing and a sort of hierarchical sorting, both of the general info about each film, and in particular the detailed notes I generated from those films for which I led the discussion.
Now the founder of the club has assigned me the task of archivist. Not only of each of the 50 films we've studied so far, but also the nominated films (we always vote from a list of choices that the boss assigns)...So there's maybe 300 films that I will be documenting either briefly or in detail.
Sadly, in the give and take of our hour-long meetings I've not been able to note the insights from our group discussions (I'm not one who can take useful notes contemporaneously), but I am fairly certain I can recall at least a few key points when I get started on any film.
My gawd Ted: you're such a wonderful madman! Thank you for this, and it - and your delightful commenters - make me feel less alone.
Many years ago I went to a stationery store and bought a bunch of black 3x5 index card boxes, later 4x6s. I had a large array of topics that fascinated me, so when I was reading anything and there was an idea that I saw as linking or valuable or was "dissentual data" or just enriched said topic, I entered it on 4x6 cards, with topics like "Model Agnosticism" or "Acceleration of Information in History" or "The Sociology of Knowledge" or "James Joyce" or "Rhetoric of Humor" or "Dark Matter of Intellectual's Culture." I'll enter title/author/page number and then a few sentences. If I have a book from the library, I'll write much more, because I'll have to return the book.
I end up drawing arrows on a card to link one idea in a book to someone else's book that contains ideas that modulate, disagree with, or seem isomorphic.
Gradually, I saw how all these topics can and will "link" in my mind, which I privately think of as "psycho-logic." Now I know I can pull out a batch of cards and read my notes and sparks go off in my mind: I get ideas. I treat poetry, novels, and non-fiction as one thing. Really interesting ideas can be found anywhere.
One of the things I've learned from this is there are certain authors who I find endlessly interesting, even if hardly anyone seems to have heard of them. It's my own honed-over-years weirdness PLUS the author.
It sounds like you came up with your own version of the system described in Sonke Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes. I've been reading it but thus far can't visualize how such a system works in practice. How do you decide on your topic headings? How do you decide whether a new note goes under an existing heading or needs a new one? Etc., etc., etc.
Thanks for the interest and questions. And I need to read Sonke Ahren now!
I pick my subject headings simply because at some point I realize I'm totally fascinated by this topic, so whatever my current understanding of it is, I'm going to want to make notes of my responses to my reading "in and around" the topic. Also, I'll get ideas about the topic while in the shower or on a bike ride, and I write those down on 4x6 cards, too. Re-reading the cards makes me clarify some aspects of the topic and leads to further questions. It's almost all intrinsic for me, although I have contributed essays for books in which my cards made writing a long essay easy and fun: it turns out I'd already done tons of "research"!
Your other Q to me: how do I know if something goes under an existing topic heading or if it needs a new one: this has been an endlessly interesting, organic way to learn about my own nervous system and all that stuff Cognitive Scientists like Eleanor Rosch of Berkeley have written on "categorization." I start off thinking "this obviously goes under this topic." At some point, I realize something goes under more than one subject 4x6 card, so I enter the data on both cards. At some point I start thinking about how I've conceptualized something too narrowly or too generally, and I end up thinking about this for a while, and make changes. Because I realize I now "see" topics in a larger dimension. EX: at first I had very many notes on "Intellectuals" but they were under "Sociology of Knowledge." Then I realized there's quite a lot of difference between the two topics: in Phenomenological Sociology, Berger and Luckmann opened up the sociology of knowledge to include everything that's taken as "knowledge" in a culture, which is, in general, not what Intellectuals do. So those notes branched off, in a big way.
Another example: many years ago I made 4x6s for the topic "Drugs". Very quickly I realized my interests weren't the same regarding Pharmaceutical Drugs, psychedelic drugs, cannabis, and alcohol and tobacco. What about addiction? Is TV and social media a drug? Etc! Those cards all splintered into different topics, and it sounds like work, but here I always think about Dr. Samuel Johnson's definition under Lexicographer: "a harmless drudge."
Maybe what I enjoy most about my boxes of index cards with TONS of notes in them: when I read my notes in one category followed by another subject, I'm guaranteed to get interesting dialectical sparks, and see connections I didn't see before.
Sorry my answers were so long, but your questions were good.
If you do read the Ahrens book, you will find a system called the Zettelkasten, created by Niklas Luhmann; it's similar to yours in lots of ways. Although I love paper methods, one advantage of computer-based ones is that you can create your structure after the fact, by adding as many tags to a note as you like. So a note can go in the Drugs, Addiction, and Media categories, and whatever else you might think of later. Ahrens does a great job at explaining this.
John Pope: Oh, now I really want to read Ahrens! And I neglected to mention in earlier comments that I also make notes on my computer: it's way better for linking indexical ideas to material - mostly articles - found online. To write on a 4x6 card: "see 'Human Psychedelic Research: A Historical and Sociological Analysis' from MAPS, 1999"...too cumbersome, even for me, and besides, I can just link the article there.
I realize I might sound kinda nutty to some who read my notes on taking notes here, but honestly, I think it's a BLAST to read and write like this! And thanks to those of you who have responded with helpful comments and questions: it makes me feel a little less alone, as an independent reader/writer/quasi scholar.
If it's nutty, there are a LOT of us nuts out there, comparing note-taking methods, haunting sites like jetpens.com for the right pen/paper/notebook combinations, etc, etc.
I write "nutty" from my actual social position of unaffiliated reader/writer, who lives in a rural area and has very little real-world contact with other intellectuals. I FEEL nutty, even though I know people like Ted Gioia and you exist. I just never meet you guys. The pandemic only added to my feelings of alienation and feeling like a "nut" who reads tabloids, Finnegans Wake, books on rhetoric, and the sociology of science, etc.
That said, I'm still quite happy to read widely and take notes and submit articles. I suspect I'm not an island.
What a wonderful post. I’ve found I retain very little from what I read if I don’t keep notes. It’s an essential part of my own writing after the fact. I love seeing your process here. Thanks for sharing!
It’s time to talk about technology and note taking because it’s made your book markings obsolete and slow. Now, the ability to highlight sections of books in Kindle and have them sync to Obsidian or Roam Research (my preferred platform) is a nitro boost to this vital process you’ve laid out, Ted. I have a weekly session now where I go through the synchronized notes from the books I read digitally and perform the second and third tier of note taking you describe. This is one of those times where technology really has improved the process of work.
Oh, I like this idea! All I've ever done with my e-book notes is copy them over to Evernote to store chronologically. I'll have to look at the programs you mentioned.
I took notes recently while reading S T Joshi's Collected Fiction of H P Lovecraft. It made the reading much more enjoyable. There is a real interesting Substack called "Noted" which I highly recommend.
There's a lot of research on this that shows that you remember stuff better when physically writing it down vs. typing it. Sorry, don't have links available at the moment.
Ted is a better man than I. Obviously, if anyone here has read my rambling commentary. But he has now given me an excuse: My personal development was sabotaged by my inability to take notes coherently. I'm unable to take notes quickly enough to do me any good. Even as I come close to completing my sixth decade, I still rely on listening carefully. My colleagues are surprised at my ability to remember specific facts and statements from meetings and seminars, and I managed to complete seventeen years of education successfully (with straight A's occasionally, no less) and become a registered architect. So it worked OK for me, and I'm simply too old to care now. Of course, that in no way diminishes my admiration for this, and all of Ted's wide-ranging exemplary capabilities, and I think we're all lucky to know about them.
I also had trouble taking notes quickly enough to keep up with some of my professors, but book study still enabled me to finish college with straight A's and law school at the top of my class. Us sexagenarians (or soon to be, in your case) don't have that excuse when it comes to our reading, though.
I regards to reading: I read slowly, approximately one page for every two of my wife's. She has the captions on when watching TV because she doesn't hear well, while I hear fine, which is good because I can't read the captions quickly enough. Despite that I'm an avid reader and prefer longer, detailed manuscripts like a seven hundred page Clancy thriller, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," or Churchill's seven volume history of WWII. And I do tend to have a reasonable memory of the things I do read, but it's more difficult to remember, I suspect because I'm getting older, and there's so much more being stuffed in by visiting the interweb.
The key thing to me in what you're saying here is that you're *engaged with the material*. It's not just Read->Regurgitate->Forget. Doesn't matter how you do it, the benefit is in the doing!
I just returned from a long weekend in Chicago with my family.
Took the train to Union Station. Went to a News Stand to buy a local paper. There was no display for any newspapers. The cashier of the News Stand told me they don’t sell papers. Really a Need Stand with no news!
I believe that the internet has led to the downfall of our interaction with the written word, and this is not good.
Reading a news paper or a book on a Kindle or iPad is not the same as reading a hard copy. I also find this true with scientific papers I read and review.
Can't speak for Ted; would be for me. I gave up cursive writing early in grade school. My teacher never forgave me, but at least she gained the ability to read what I'd written.
It is proven fact that cursive writing is faster than printing, and that it improves brain retention and connectivity. It is also a sensory joy, the movement of strikes, ink on nice paper, etc. plus the fact of writing by hand at all is 100% proven to help brain engagement. No substitutes. Notes are not for speed anyway.
My note taking is very similar! When I read a book, I mark it up, but I mostly underline passages and sometimes use exclamation marks or even a "lol" if it's funny. Then I let the book sit for a few weeks after I've finished reading it, then I grab it again and begin to copy down each passage into my notebook. After each passage, I write my thoughts on it, and over time, these notes become part of the conversation I'm having with myself within that particular notebook. It's mingled with my journal entries and language studies and todo list and sketches and all I use my notebooks for. I've been doing this for a few years, and I love it immensely.
Note-taking should be its own subject in schools. As your piece implies, taking notes is just another way of saying "critical thinking" and it is a skill that so many of us lack.
Every day I write down a few quotes from something I read that stood out for me. I also write down 7 things I saw or noticed during the day. I also write down, in narrative form as you mention, the things memorable from that day. These are my ways of actively engaging with the material of my life. Thank you for your newsletter. I'm glad I'm not the only person who writes notes and marginalia...😊
This is part of what I love about blogging/substack culture. My various blogs have acted as a commonplace book (complete with tagging system) and a prompt to always consider at the end of reading something interesting: do I want to actively noodle on this for a bit?
The practice reminds me of this advice from the title figure of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler:
"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow."
Yes, I can attest to the value of "incubation" of ideas. Sometimes you have to let what you already have on deck swirl around and marinate in brain, heart and soul.
Very difficult, but different strokes for different folks. Personally I found taking notes to distract from really listening. I'd see other students frantic about trying to jot down stuff the lecturer was saying, but then I'd get the highest grade in the class. But I also came prepared, I'd already read the material so hearing what the professor thought was important wasn't my first exposure to the material. I also never gave a bleep about learning for the test. I figured if I just did my best to master the material, the results would follow. They almost did, except for a few subjective lecturers who didn't want original thinking so much as their own takes regurgitated. I was a bioengineering major at Columbia and learned to loathe some of the renowned "liberal arts" professors like one Dennis Dalton whose audiotapes were available through those airline magazine ads 30 years ago. Go figure, I read all the books by and about Karl Marx and Hitler (y's) and those who just repeated what he wanted to hear without bothering to read classic works got better grades. Maybe that's why more bridges don't fall down while our society and zeitgeist are hot messes. Anyway point being that while note taking has its advantages, I find the multitasking a bit counterproductive. In med school we had a volunteer transcription service. Cost like 250 a term, someone would record and then transcribe the lecture word for word. If you transcribed four of them or so you didn't have to pay the 250. Read the material, go to the lectures (only for the good professors, I learned which were a waste of time), then read the transcript notes when they came out a few days later. Now that was the best of both worlds, and I don't recall anyone who didn't pay for the service and went to class taking their own notes. And damn I'm good at multitasking, but sometimes I think (maybe always?) there are times when one shouldn't and should focus 100% on the task at hand.
Also though, there's something essential about writing shit down. Something in the brain where the writing just engraves it in the memory. Hard to memorize a poem? Try writing it out slowly, then writing it again. Even better than typing. It's been studied, something about the writing literally helps your brain lock it in better. We used to write down phone numbers and redial them and after a few calls you knew the number by heart. Now you just enter it right into your dumbphone and can't remember any phone numbers by heart.
I'm having problems remembering music pieces, doesn't matter how many times I play them. Was never my strength but I did play piano concertos and such without needing to look at the music. In other ways my memory is better than ever. There are different kinds, and our brain is a mystery.
I always found reading ahead a way to come in with a prepared mind. Even if I understood the reading, the lecture would make things clearer and easier to remember.
100%, never understood those who thought attending the class would make up for a lack of preparation beforehand. I went to a damn good high school where nobody ever seemed unprepared. Gave me good habits for college and med school. Never fall behind and everything kind of takes care of itself. The students walking around in a panic a week or two before exams always mystified me. I went in like a boxer confident in his training. Music is a great example, you don't practice and the lesson with the teacher is a waste of time. Tangentially I don't understand how kids go to school for 6-8 hours a day and don't learn anything, like that's their goal. Seems like a lot of energy expended to not improve yourself when you're already stuck there.
I love the term 'dumb phone'. Jim Kwik (look him up on YouTube) talks about digital dementia, and I agree with him.
Oh my god I've wasted my entire life...
I feel a bit like that, too.
Ditto
Great thoughts! I've always considered it important to write thoughts down if you want to remember what you got out of a book years later, but never thought about doing it for anything else.
I started today by writing a 3 paragraph summary and reflection on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which I watched over the weekend. I thought I'd feel silly at first, but as I found myself unable to recall all the details until I wrote out my summary point-by-point (even cheating a little with a wikipedia summary on specific details like character names), I can conclude that I now have a far better grip on the film's plot and characters. I'm confident I could have a basic discussion about the film and will retain the details more effectively than I would have. It's not a movie I would have considered worth summarizing and reflecting on beforehand, but I'm glad Ted prompted me to give it a try. I'm pleasantly surprised concerning the value I now see in doing it.
I think I'll give this a try with music too and see what I can come up with.
Started doing this when a friend initiated a film club in March 2020 (yeah, enforced shutin-ism). Nothing handwritten, but plenty of background reading/viewing and a sort of hierarchical sorting, both of the general info about each film, and in particular the detailed notes I generated from those films for which I led the discussion.
Now the founder of the club has assigned me the task of archivist. Not only of each of the 50 films we've studied so far, but also the nominated films (we always vote from a list of choices that the boss assigns)...So there's maybe 300 films that I will be documenting either briefly or in detail.
Sadly, in the give and take of our hour-long meetings I've not been able to note the insights from our group discussions (I'm not one who can take useful notes contemporaneously), but I am fairly certain I can recall at least a few key points when I get started on any film.
What a cool idea!
My gawd Ted: you're such a wonderful madman! Thank you for this, and it - and your delightful commenters - make me feel less alone.
Many years ago I went to a stationery store and bought a bunch of black 3x5 index card boxes, later 4x6s. I had a large array of topics that fascinated me, so when I was reading anything and there was an idea that I saw as linking or valuable or was "dissentual data" or just enriched said topic, I entered it on 4x6 cards, with topics like "Model Agnosticism" or "Acceleration of Information in History" or "The Sociology of Knowledge" or "James Joyce" or "Rhetoric of Humor" or "Dark Matter of Intellectual's Culture." I'll enter title/author/page number and then a few sentences. If I have a book from the library, I'll write much more, because I'll have to return the book.
I end up drawing arrows on a card to link one idea in a book to someone else's book that contains ideas that modulate, disagree with, or seem isomorphic.
Gradually, I saw how all these topics can and will "link" in my mind, which I privately think of as "psycho-logic." Now I know I can pull out a batch of cards and read my notes and sparks go off in my mind: I get ideas. I treat poetry, novels, and non-fiction as one thing. Really interesting ideas can be found anywhere.
One of the things I've learned from this is there are certain authors who I find endlessly interesting, even if hardly anyone seems to have heard of them. It's my own honed-over-years weirdness PLUS the author.
It sounds like you came up with your own version of the system described in Sonke Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes. I've been reading it but thus far can't visualize how such a system works in practice. How do you decide on your topic headings? How do you decide whether a new note goes under an existing heading or needs a new one? Etc., etc., etc.
Deborah:
Thanks for the interest and questions. And I need to read Sonke Ahren now!
I pick my subject headings simply because at some point I realize I'm totally fascinated by this topic, so whatever my current understanding of it is, I'm going to want to make notes of my responses to my reading "in and around" the topic. Also, I'll get ideas about the topic while in the shower or on a bike ride, and I write those down on 4x6 cards, too. Re-reading the cards makes me clarify some aspects of the topic and leads to further questions. It's almost all intrinsic for me, although I have contributed essays for books in which my cards made writing a long essay easy and fun: it turns out I'd already done tons of "research"!
Your other Q to me: how do I know if something goes under an existing topic heading or if it needs a new one: this has been an endlessly interesting, organic way to learn about my own nervous system and all that stuff Cognitive Scientists like Eleanor Rosch of Berkeley have written on "categorization." I start off thinking "this obviously goes under this topic." At some point, I realize something goes under more than one subject 4x6 card, so I enter the data on both cards. At some point I start thinking about how I've conceptualized something too narrowly or too generally, and I end up thinking about this for a while, and make changes. Because I realize I now "see" topics in a larger dimension. EX: at first I had very many notes on "Intellectuals" but they were under "Sociology of Knowledge." Then I realized there's quite a lot of difference between the two topics: in Phenomenological Sociology, Berger and Luckmann opened up the sociology of knowledge to include everything that's taken as "knowledge" in a culture, which is, in general, not what Intellectuals do. So those notes branched off, in a big way.
Another example: many years ago I made 4x6s for the topic "Drugs". Very quickly I realized my interests weren't the same regarding Pharmaceutical Drugs, psychedelic drugs, cannabis, and alcohol and tobacco. What about addiction? Is TV and social media a drug? Etc! Those cards all splintered into different topics, and it sounds like work, but here I always think about Dr. Samuel Johnson's definition under Lexicographer: "a harmless drudge."
Maybe what I enjoy most about my boxes of index cards with TONS of notes in them: when I read my notes in one category followed by another subject, I'm guaranteed to get interesting dialectical sparks, and see connections I didn't see before.
Sorry my answers were so long, but your questions were good.
Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly.
If you do read the Ahrens book, you will find a system called the Zettelkasten, created by Niklas Luhmann; it's similar to yours in lots of ways. Although I love paper methods, one advantage of computer-based ones is that you can create your structure after the fact, by adding as many tags to a note as you like. So a note can go in the Drugs, Addiction, and Media categories, and whatever else you might think of later. Ahrens does a great job at explaining this.
John Pope: Oh, now I really want to read Ahrens! And I neglected to mention in earlier comments that I also make notes on my computer: it's way better for linking indexical ideas to material - mostly articles - found online. To write on a 4x6 card: "see 'Human Psychedelic Research: A Historical and Sociological Analysis' from MAPS, 1999"...too cumbersome, even for me, and besides, I can just link the article there.
I realize I might sound kinda nutty to some who read my notes on taking notes here, but honestly, I think it's a BLAST to read and write like this! And thanks to those of you who have responded with helpful comments and questions: it makes me feel a little less alone, as an independent reader/writer/quasi scholar.
If it's nutty, there are a LOT of us nuts out there, comparing note-taking methods, haunting sites like jetpens.com for the right pen/paper/notebook combinations, etc, etc.
I write "nutty" from my actual social position of unaffiliated reader/writer, who lives in a rural area and has very little real-world contact with other intellectuals. I FEEL nutty, even though I know people like Ted Gioia and you exist. I just never meet you guys. The pandemic only added to my feelings of alienation and feeling like a "nut" who reads tabloids, Finnegans Wake, books on rhetoric, and the sociology of science, etc.
That said, I'm still quite happy to read widely and take notes and submit articles. I suspect I'm not an island.
Good questions Deborah.
"Psycho-logic"--love it! Tx. PG
What a wonderful post. I’ve found I retain very little from what I read if I don’t keep notes. It’s an essential part of my own writing after the fact. I love seeing your process here. Thanks for sharing!
It’s time to talk about technology and note taking because it’s made your book markings obsolete and slow. Now, the ability to highlight sections of books in Kindle and have them sync to Obsidian or Roam Research (my preferred platform) is a nitro boost to this vital process you’ve laid out, Ted. I have a weekly session now where I go through the synchronized notes from the books I read digitally and perform the second and third tier of note taking you describe. This is one of those times where technology really has improved the process of work.
There’s something even now though about physical note taking versus digital
Oh, I like this idea! All I've ever done with my e-book notes is copy them over to Evernote to store chronologically. I'll have to look at the programs you mentioned.
As promised, here is the essay on better note taking. https://jbminton.substack.com/p/how-to-process-book-notes-in-the
I’ve been meaning to publish an essay about this process. Subscribe and I’ll do that this week.
Subscribed!
I took notes recently while reading S T Joshi's Collected Fiction of H P Lovecraft. It made the reading much more enjoyable. There is a real interesting Substack called "Noted" which I highly recommend.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jillianhess/p/john-lennons-love-notes?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3h7ub
Do you have any opinions on handwritten vs typed notes?
There's a lot of research on this that shows that you remember stuff better when physically writing it down vs. typing it. Sorry, don't have links available at the moment.
My own two cents: my handwriting is ghastly and I'm a frequent editor and reviser. Typing for the win!
Ted is a better man than I. Obviously, if anyone here has read my rambling commentary. But he has now given me an excuse: My personal development was sabotaged by my inability to take notes coherently. I'm unable to take notes quickly enough to do me any good. Even as I come close to completing my sixth decade, I still rely on listening carefully. My colleagues are surprised at my ability to remember specific facts and statements from meetings and seminars, and I managed to complete seventeen years of education successfully (with straight A's occasionally, no less) and become a registered architect. So it worked OK for me, and I'm simply too old to care now. Of course, that in no way diminishes my admiration for this, and all of Ted's wide-ranging exemplary capabilities, and I think we're all lucky to know about them.
I also had trouble taking notes quickly enough to keep up with some of my professors, but book study still enabled me to finish college with straight A's and law school at the top of my class. Us sexagenarians (or soon to be, in your case) don't have that excuse when it comes to our reading, though.
I regards to reading: I read slowly, approximately one page for every two of my wife's. She has the captions on when watching TV because she doesn't hear well, while I hear fine, which is good because I can't read the captions quickly enough. Despite that I'm an avid reader and prefer longer, detailed manuscripts like a seven hundred page Clancy thriller, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," or Churchill's seven volume history of WWII. And I do tend to have a reasonable memory of the things I do read, but it's more difficult to remember, I suspect because I'm getting older, and there's so much more being stuffed in by visiting the interweb.
The key thing to me in what you're saying here is that you're *engaged with the material*. It's not just Read->Regurgitate->Forget. Doesn't matter how you do it, the benefit is in the doing!
I just returned from a long weekend in Chicago with my family.
Took the train to Union Station. Went to a News Stand to buy a local paper. There was no display for any newspapers. The cashier of the News Stand told me they don’t sell papers. Really a Need Stand with no news!
I believe that the internet has led to the downfall of our interaction with the written word, and this is not good.
Reading a news paper or a book on a Kindle or iPad is not the same as reading a hard copy. I also find this true with scientific papers I read and review.
Is it a definite choice not to use cursive script in your note taking?
Can't speak for Ted; would be for me. I gave up cursive writing early in grade school. My teacher never forgave me, but at least she gained the ability to read what I'd written.
It is proven fact that cursive writing is faster than printing, and that it improves brain retention and connectivity. It is also a sensory joy, the movement of strikes, ink on nice paper, etc. plus the fact of writing by hand at all is 100% proven to help brain engagement. No substitutes. Notes are not for speed anyway.
My note taking is very similar! When I read a book, I mark it up, but I mostly underline passages and sometimes use exclamation marks or even a "lol" if it's funny. Then I let the book sit for a few weeks after I've finished reading it, then I grab it again and begin to copy down each passage into my notebook. After each passage, I write my thoughts on it, and over time, these notes become part of the conversation I'm having with myself within that particular notebook. It's mingled with my journal entries and language studies and todo list and sketches and all I use my notebooks for. I've been doing this for a few years, and I love it immensely.
Yes!!! Highlighters galore.