I took a course recently in which there was some treatment of consistent note-taking as a way to maximise our reading. Simply put, poor rather than carefully thought-though, strategic, note-taking will result in having to re-read what we have already put the time into. A good system can allow us to recover quickly and easily what we extracted from our reading.
Now, the example provided in class included the following:
- Solid underline for a major point
- Dashed line for a minor point
- Sequences identified with numbers (1, 2, 3...)
- A star symbol used for something "interesting"
- A question mark for something puzzling
- Word circling for unfamiliar or strange terms and ideas to look up
- A and D as indicative of agreement or disagreement
- Double-brackets around summaries or keywords
This is combined with a four colour system:
- Black for facts
- Blue for method
- Red for critique (i.e., your own, use when noting your response)
- Green for "wow"
It should also be noted that this system is not to be applied blindly to any book or article. One must start by formulating for oneself what one is looking for in a specific resource and THEN decides what to annotate. For instance, it might be silly to highlight "method" in a devotional. A lot of the annotations have to do with studying content whether it is academic or not.
The example was designed for pen and pencil annotation of printed documents. I am NOT using it as of yet. I want to ponder the best way to adapt its concepts to working with Logos, a pointing device, and the highlighting and label functionalities available therein.
This thread is an invitation to others who are interested in the topic to reflect together on some of the best ways to do this. I know there have been threads that ask what others have done. But usually the discussion is not predicated on clearly identified principles to start with.
In the present discussion, I found most interesting the notion of discerning between "note-taking" and "note-making".
- Note-taking is taking notes to remember what the resource was about: claims, methods, arguments, conclusions. It is NOT evaluative (black and blue above).
- Note-making is response and critique. It is evaluative (red and green above).
Many of my past notes and highlights have tended to blend these instead of distinguishing between them. I have found that usually this has resulted in note-making taking over note-taking with the result that I lose sight of the latter and end up with patchy, poorly organised highlights.
As I invite interaction on this, I realise that personal preferences have their place. I hope targeted conversation can help us all get good ideas as to practical and effective ways to do this and improve our habits but it's up to us to pick and choose what we prefer.
So... let's go? Please if you think you have a good practice that you want to describe, do relate it to the elements identified above. We don't want to end up with fifty posts that say "I do red highlight for this, and yellow for that, it works for me". Let's talk specifically about a solid system to remember content and a related but distinct scheme to evaluate systematically.
