How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes
It’s important to Write about what you read. 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:
- Write a broad note which captures the “big idea” of one of your clusters.
- Are there multiple big ideas? Write multiple broad notes to maintain Evergreen notes should be atomic.
- Write finer-grained notes: Look through the individual scraps in that cluster. Write notes which capture more nuanced atomic ideas within that cluster.
- Connect: Search for relevant past notes which relate to these new notes. Link, merge, and revise as necessary to represent your new, synthesized conception of those ideas.
- See Evergreen notes should be densely linked and Create speculative outlines while you write.
- Revise: Return to the broad note and improve your summary based on what you’ve learned writing the detailed notes and the details you’ve unpacked, if it’s possible to do so without muddying their focus. Remove detailed notes that are no longer necessary; update others based on what you learned writing your updated broad note if appropriate.
- Loop — uid: 202006021337 tags: #literature #zettelkasten