You have taken meticulous notes, making sure you have all the important notes and sources lined up before you start your writing. Still, the writing feels like starting over and you are not quite sure what you really want to say when you finally sit down to write.

This scenario might stem from how we see the role of notes. If we understand our notes as being a place for collecting and storing, they will most likely only be filled with facts, quotes, and summaries. These parts are important to note as essential for citation, recollection and engaging with other’s ideas. But if we mainly interpret the role of notes to be fact-containers, then our own thinking risks staying outside our notes. This often means that we forget our deeper thinking about the things we read or even that this thinking gets postponed for later when its time to sit down and write something coherent about our research.
Two main issues arise from this perception and use of notes; firstly, your notetaking practice can feel like unfruitful and boring busywork and secondly, writing becomes overwhelming when you have to think the whole argument through when you sit down to write.

Notes as Thinking Tools

Most of us who experienced traditional schooling will have learned to take notes through this fact-container mindset, where being good at recording other people’s thoughts and perspectives was the primary goal. It is perhaps not as much an unlearning that needs to be done, but instead a change in perspective on how notetaking is to be understood. If instead you frame notes as thinking tools for navigating life, research and knowledge creation, your thinking will be integrated in every note you take. It brings exploration, questioning and developing your own understanding into focus, and aids in creating arguments and perspectives for your writing already in the notetaking process. This change in the perception of notes from fact-containers to tools for thinking helps shift notetaking from passive collection to active engagement as a central aspect in every good advice on notetaking practices.

Wrong Input, Wrong Output

If we are going to get the best from our notesystem in relation to research, then it needs to be designed with the aim of thinking and knowledge creation in mind. Like a machine, we have to provide our notesystem with the proper fuel in order to yield the output that we want from it. If we only feed our notesystem with summaries of others’ work, thoughts and quotes, there will be a chance that we are turning our notesystem into a filing cabinet when instead what we actually want is a thinking tool. For example, let’s say you are reading a research article. Here a particular definition of a concept you are trying to get a better understanding of is being stated clearly and succinctly. We can copy this definition into our notes, since it’s useful and often necessary having it for reference later on. Yet, if we stop there and read on, we would not really have engaged with the definition and used our notes as thinking tools, but just collected it as a ‘factual’ piece in our notesystem. Perhaps we didn’t reflect on whether this aligns with other sources, what parts we agree with, or how it fits into our own thinking. But most probably we actually did think about it, but did not capture these thoughts in our notes, resulting in that we need to think about it again when we sit down to write, where the initial insights might be lost.

From extra work to THE work

Instead, when notes become real thinking tools they act as a critical part of thinking and research. Levy (2011) points out how notes are not only a means of making research and intellectual work easier, but due to the need for our minds to rely on external scaffolding, notes are essential to make intellectual work possible. In other words, notes are not a waste of time or a luxury for whenever possible. They are how complex thinking becomes possible. As Ahrens (2017) writes in his book about notetaking, if we think within our notes or ‘develop our thinking in writing’ then when we sit down to write, we have already built up strings of arguments where writing can suddenly become a manageable and perhaps even joyful task (pp. 21-23).

So a way of checking your own view of notetaking is to simply pause and ask yourself the next time you take notes: Am I only collecting facts, or am I thinking within my notes?

References

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take smart notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking—For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Sönke Ahrens.

Levy, N. (2011). Neuroethics and the Extended Mind. In J. Illes & B. J. Sahakian (Eds),
Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (p. 285). Oxford University Press.