Do not just collect quotes or paraphrase an author’s thoughts just to capture exactly what they say. Avoid collecting information.
Do what your mind naturally does: understand a material using your own ontology then write about the material using your own voice. This also makes things easier for your future self because you don’t have to return to the original source to understand it. You have already understood it in the past and you have recorded that understanding. So you just have to return to that understanding.
When you use a note-writing system like talahardin to facilitate thinking, what you are doing then is collecting your own thoughts.
The problem with this method however is that we don’t always understand something the first time and so the understanding we caught on a note might be inadequate.
Interesting thoughts here
- Information is relative. Something is information for me. If it does not reach me, it is not information.
- Information is the material that gets filtered by the brain due to stimuli from outside that gets printed in my mind.
- You cannot access the contents of a text directly.
- There is no such thing as information in the text. There is only information you created from the text.
- Text is just stimuli. It is not that important compared to info you generate from reading material.
To do
- Connect this note to your research on how to write permanent notes in your own voice.
References
Tietze, C. (200 C.E., 51:25). Stop Relying on a Source and Have Faith in Your own Thoughts. Zettelkasten. https://www.zettelkasten.de/posts/dont-rely-on-source-have-faith-in-yourself/