If you want to deeply internalize something you’re reading, the best way I know is to write about it:
For deep understanding, it’s not enough to just highlight or write marginalia in books: there isn’t much pressure to synthesize, connect, or to get to the heart of things. And they don’t add up to anything over time as you read more. Instead, write Evergreen notes as you read.
But of course, it doesn’t always make sense to read in this way: much of the time you’re not really trying to internalize the text deeply, and text may not be worthy of that much attention: The best way to read is highly contextual.
Also, it’s worth noting: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading. Speaking at least for myself, experience has suggested that I need more support to effectively engage with what I’m reading.
Our broad approach is an alternating cycle:
Luhmann, N. (1992). Communicating with Slip Boxes. In A. Kieserling (Ed.), & M. Kuehn (Trans.), Universität als Milieu: Kleine Schriften (pp. 53–61). Retrieved from http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.
Levy, N. (2013). Neuroethics and the Extended Mind. In J. Illes & B. J. Sahakian (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (pp. 285–294). Oxford University Press.
Notes on paper, or on a computer screen … do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible.
It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply, but it’s distracting to switch back and forth between reading and writing polished notes. Instead, collect insights in a lightweight way while you read. You can put them in A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes. That'll Close open loops, and you’ll process them later (see How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes).
Annotations—even inline marginalia which include your own writing—have very little informational value. They’re atomized; they don’t relate to each other; they don’t add up to anything; they’re ultra-compressed; they’re largely unedited. That’s fine: think of them as just a reminder. They say “hey, look at this passage,” with a few words of context to jog your memory about what the passage was about.
Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. You wouldn’t want to rely on that long-term, since then you’d just have a huge pile of hooks you’d have to “follow” anytime you wanted to think about your experience with that book.
When processing these observations, you’ll want to be able to see the big picture and see clusters of ideas, so it’s helpful to collect annotations in a manipulable fashion.
Concretely, the approach I’m trying:
==TODO==
I find the digital solutions quite unsatisfying: it’s slow and heavy browsing between annotations in these solutions.
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books
The text inspired a thought, and the inspiring part is already marked in the text.
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes
taking notes on my Mac while reading just doesn’t work for me. My state while typing is too different from the state I’m in when I read print. Going back and forth requires heavy switching of mental gears. First, this wears me out after a while. Second, this switching ruins the focus: I cannot follow the text properly. That’s why I take notes on paper and mark the passage I want to refer to with a little * in the page’s margin.
It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. While reading, you’ve marked passages that seem relevant, and you’ve scribbled notes with your thoughts (How to collect observations while reading). Now we’ll process all that into lasting notes.
First: what notes should even get written? We’ll write Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented, so what are the key concepts? You need to take a step back and form a picture of the overall structure of the ideas. Concretely, you might do that by clustering your scraps into piles and observing the structure that emerges. Or you might sketch a mind map or a visual outline. The structure you observe does not have to match the book’s structure: it’s whatever makes sense relative to your own personal ontology (Do your own thinking).
Once you have a picture of the concepts at play, you’ll begin an iterative process of note-writing. Here I’ve summarized Christian Tietze’s process, which I’m presently adopting / adapting:
Create Zettel from Reading Notes • Zettelkasten Method
Second, I find out if a cluster’s main point has too many prerequisites to stand alone. It might be a conclusion which draws from lots of assumptions or from complex models I’d need to explain. I prepare the conclusion first and then branch off into other notes to capture all the necessary ideas. This is where links come in handy: the details point back to the concept note and the concept note mentions its detail branches.
Clusters don’t lean onto the book’s outline. A book’s index for example collects references, not caring about the table of contents or the flow of ideas. For definitions of terms a similar approach is useful: collect usage examples in the text and definitions themselves to get a clear picture of the term’s meaning. Clusters can be topic-based, too, just like an index.
This is what I call ‘orthogonal to the content’: they don’t adhere to the succession of pages and sections. Instead, clusters form themselves around any purpose you deem fitting.
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.
Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index.