advice on taking notes

note-taking habits
by doctorzamalek

Alex writes:

“Hi there. A whole post on your note taking habits and marginal symbols would make for interesting reading. Always intrigued to know how others work this kind of stuff. Thanks!”

Sure, though in my case it may be less interesting than you wish.

The major reading project of my life was the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, which set my note-taking habits more or less in stone. Though that’s not what you were asking about, a bit of background may give this some context.

This exercise lasted from ages 23-30, though only about midway did I actually adopt the goal of reading them all; before that it was just “as many as possible”. In a sense it’s a never-ending project, because they keep putting out 1-2 new volumes of Heidegger per year, though it’s fairly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff in most cases by now, with a few key exceptions.

Mentally, I refer to this period of life as “the Manhattan Project,” since it was nearly all-consuming, and there was practically no moment in my twenties when I didn’t have a Gesamtausgabe volume nearby. (I sound like fun, eh?) The first volume (the Beiträge, chosen because I correctly guessed that it would take many years to produce even a flawed English version) was a painfully slow read. High school German (which I was fortunate even to have had) obviously isn’t perfect preparation for Heidegger’s German. But by the second volume (the 29/30 animal life course) I had already looked up all his vocabulary words several times, and any particular author just isn’t going to use a wide range of vocabulary. After about 5 or 6 volumes, you may as well be reading the sports pages, because not only does he repeat the same words– he repeats the exact same ideas. I was literally taking the volumes to Cubs games and reading them during innings breaks by the end. (I’d get dirty looks from the other fans once in awhile for that– especially if I kept reading into the start of an inning and there was a leadoff home run and I’d have to ask “who just homered?” while putting a grey Heidegger volume back into my bag. They’d always tell me the name of the player, but there was always a certain slap in the tone.)

All right, back to the topic…

For the first half-dozen volumes or so, I was for some reason following the ridiculous method of stopping every time I found an important sentence and copying it by hand onto notebook paper. This was an idiotic method, both because it wasted precious time, and also because you then have to make sure you keep track of where the notebook paper is afterward. While reading the German Sein und Zeit, with its countless important sentences, I was the picture of a miserable person, getting through just a couple of pages per sitting until my hand would start to ache.

A friend noticed my misery, and pointed out that I ought to switch to a method of simple brackets around the important passages. So simple, so brilliant. And that begins the list of the basic apparatus I use for note-taking.

1. Simple brackets in the margin. The idea here is that I may want to go back and reread the book in a hurry, if asked to write a fast article on it or something. And I now have all of the volumes other than the first half-dozen I read marked up in such a way that only, say, 20% of the passages in the volume are bracketed. The “Highlight Reel” of the volume. 9 times out of 10, that’s all I will read when rereading the volume, because I’ve found that I can trust the judgment of my younger self. The passages I appreciated in the old days are the same ones I appreciate now. (With the occasional “how did I miss that?” moment added in, of course.)

2. Especially outstanding sentences copied in full at the top of the page. Some sentences are so earth-shattering that I want them boldly visible at the top of the page. That way, I also have the option of the SUPER-fast reread of a particular volume. Let’s say I want to go back through his 1930 course on human freedom, don’t have time to reread the whole thing or even the bracketed parts, and just want to remind myself what the main idea was. In such scenarios I can flip through the pages just looking for the copied-out sentences.

3. Circled page numbers. Once in awhile, Heidegger will get on a roll, and an entire page or series of several pages will be incredible almost without break. In those cases, I tend to circle the page numbers with very thick pencil and maybe put several giant asterisks near the page numbers to call my attention to that fact.

4. Underlined sentences. For stuff that’s slightly more important than just bracketing, but not quite important enough to copy in full at the top or in the margin, there is the underlining option. If I underline the sentence, it’s probably already bracketed.

5. Geometric figures in the margins. I always thought this was a private obsessive-compulsive sort of trait, but have been shocked over the years to see many scholars do exactly this same thing. People always ask whether a triangle means a specific thing and a spiral another specific thing, etc., but I think the only rule is that the more complicated the shape, the more important the passage. And in truth, this fifth option does border on a sort of compulsive, fruitless doodling, though it does make the margins look pretty.

6. Humorous notations. As described in the previous post, I see no shame in using highly visible smiley faces, clown-heads, and abstract clown-toys as visual reminders of especially hilarious passages. In the case of Heidegger, as I mentioned, the “hilarious” passages are all entirely the same repeated jab about “mere” stuff, with the exception of perhaps two regular jokes in all his thousands of pages of output, both of them flat enough that your laughter would be a bit forced if they were told by your boss at a party. Latour is an author I find extremely funny, and I have all kinds of hilarious points marked in his books. In fact, Latour may be one of the funniest philosophers of the past century. Never thought of ranking him that way, but he’d have to be pretty close to the top. Once in awhile Deleuze really knocks one down too. (I don’t find Derrida even remotely funny, ever. He’s kind of like the pedantic showoff rich kid at the grad student party– one who happens to wear chic clothes but is still just a pedant.)

7. End-of-chapter summaries. If a chapter is so chock full of new ideas that I get the feeling I’ve just taken a fork in the road of life, and if there happens to be a bunch of blank space on a page after the final paragraph, I will often make an outline of the key things I’ve just heard, and the pencil scrawls are often quite excited, with most of the writing in block capitals. The best example I can remember of this is Levinas, Existence and Existents, which gets my vote for the most unknown masterpiece of 20th century continental thought. If you say “Levinas” most people will respond with “the other the other the other the other the other the other the other the other the other,” but it’s that early stuff on Heidegger from the late 1940’s that I find endlessly haunting. You can feel a new path of philosophy breaking through the forest, and also know in advance that no one’s going to take it, while also feeling that it’s not too late to go back and try it.

AND FINALLY, sometimes, maybe 30% of the time, I read a book straight through with NO NOTES AT ALL! This is probably a reaction to the excesses of note-taking in which I indulge at other times. And obviously, the note-taking decreases exponentially if it’s history or literature rather than philosophy. In the case of history or literature I’m generally only highlighting passages of stunning literary brilliance, and even for a classic author that might be 5 or so in an entire long book.

Early on while reading a book, I’ll feel that it’s either a “note-taking book” or “not a note-taking book.” And then I stick with that decision, and the rhythm of the read is completely different in the two cases.

Let’s see… science is the other genre in which I read widely, and I guess I mark science books almost as heavily as philosophy books.

Thanks, Alex! Whenever I fear running out of things to talk about in this blog, someone writes in and reminds me of things that haven’t been said yet.