One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
eBook, 188 pages
English language
Published March 10, 2022 by Sönke Ahrens.
The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and nonfiction writers to get more done, write intelligent texts and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward. The Take Smart Notes principle is based on established psychological insight and draws from a tried and tested note-taking-technique. This is the first comprehensive guide and description of this system in English, and not only does it explain how it works, but also why. It suits students and academics in the social sciences and humanities, nonfiction writers and others who are in the business of reading, thinking and writing.
Instead of wasting your time searching for notes, quotes or references, you can focus on what really counts: thinking, understanding and developing new ideas in writing. It …
The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and nonfiction writers to get more done, write intelligent texts and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward. The Take Smart Notes principle is based on established psychological insight and draws from a tried and tested note-taking-technique. This is the first comprehensive guide and description of this system in English, and not only does it explain how it works, but also why. It suits students and academics in the social sciences and humanities, nonfiction writers and others who are in the business of reading, thinking and writing.
Instead of wasting your time searching for notes, quotes or references, you can focus on what really counts: thinking, understanding and developing new ideas in writing. It does not matter if you prefer taking notes with pen and paper or on a computer, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. And you can start right away.
Really great ideas in this book. Good enough to make up for the kind of meh ending.
The ideas behind the book are good, but they're lost far and between the author's praises of the slip-box method. The amount of time spent explaining versus praising it is surprisingly low. Granted, it is a simple method, but the book would still do a good job explaining it at less than half its length. There are almost no examples -- the author does state some common pitfalls and that you need to trust your intuition, but at least one comprehensive example would have been nice.
Je suis embêté au moment d’écrire la critique de ce livre.
D’un côté, il présente de très bons concepts qui me seront probablement très utiles.
D’un autre côté, l’auteur a tendance à se répéter et la structure du livre manque de clarté. En prenant des notes comme le livre le préconise, je me suis rendu compte que certaines idées apparaissaient à plusieurs reprises dans des chapitres qui n’avaient rien à voir les uns avec les autres et que certaines parties étaient dépourvues d’idées nouvelles.
Cela m’a rendu la lecture un peu frustrante : de très bonnes idées dont je pressens tout le potentiel, mais dans une structure difficile à suivre. Heureusement que j’ai pris des notes pour digérer tout cela :-)
Meh.
Stupid, stupid heirarchies.
Ever so often, you come across ideas that, if implemented properly, can change your life. This book has presented to me an idea - Zettelkasten - that I believe has this potential.
At its core, this book is a sales pitch for the virtues of Zettelkasten, a method for personal knowledge management popularised by German polymath Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann was a prolific writer, having written over 70 books, and 400 articles in his academic career. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and attributed his massive bibliography to his note taking system - Zettelkasten. Zettelkast in, which loosely translates to "Slip Box", is a system for curating ideas from various notes. Over his lifetime, Luhmann amassed over 90,000 notes in his slipbox, each note taken on an A6 card. The notes formed a web of knowledge that allowed him to synthesize new ideas by intermingling of …
Stupid, stupid heirarchies.
Ever so often, you come across ideas that, if implemented properly, can change your life. This book has presented to me an idea - Zettelkasten - that I believe has this potential.
At its core, this book is a sales pitch for the virtues of Zettelkasten, a method for personal knowledge management popularised by German polymath Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann was a prolific writer, having written over 70 books, and 400 articles in his academic career. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and attributed his massive bibliography to his note taking system - Zettelkasten. Zettelkast in, which loosely translates to "Slip Box", is a system for curating ideas from various notes. Over his lifetime, Luhmann amassed over 90,000 notes in his slipbox, each note taken on an A6 card. The notes formed a web of knowledge that allowed him to synthesize new ideas by intermingling of the many ideas he was exposed to. The beauty of his approach was the ideas were captured in a bottoms up, associative manner. In a normal note taking system, a top down heirarchy is followed. Something like - Concept 1 - Concept 1a - Concept 1b - ...
Luhmann approached things in a different manner, he let the ideas themselves decide their relationship with other ideas. The various notes linked to each other, in a manner that flowed from idea to idea. He turned the heirarchy upside down.
The art of the Zettelkasten
Zettelkasten as a system is extremely simply. I can break it down into a few simple steps: 1. Collecting "Fleeting notes": These can be highlights, or scribblings about things that you find interesting. 2. Collecting "Literature Notes": These are notes of points that piqued your interest in books. These have to be re-written in your language, and its references must be noted down for posterity. Fleeting notes can be converted to this, if you have just some highlights, or dirty scribbles at hand. 3. Recontextualising "Literature Notes" for your slip-box: This is the core of Zettelkasten. The idea here is to create something called a "Permanent Note" from the "Literature Note". This "Permanent Note" is a polished form of the idea that recontextualises the idea you found in the literature, with respect to your slipbox. For example, you read the idea of being "verbund", a term used in the chemical industry for processes in which the by product can be used as a resource for another process. This will be your "Literature Note". You can recontextualise this idea, and based on some other Permanent note, create a Permanent Note on how all our initiatives should be "verbund". A permanent note should be written in such a manner such that it has a unique identifier, and also connects to other Permanent notes that you would want to read that are related to this note.
Step number 3 is tricky, and needs some trial and error to get right. Converting Literature notes to Permanent notes is somthing that would come with practice, something that I haven't yet mastered.
The idea is over time, the slipbox will attain a critical mass that allows for continous idea generation.
The short comings.
While the idea presented in the book is great, and the tips in general are really good, this book has quite a few shortcomings. For one, this explains the idea of the system very nicely, but faulters in explaining the implementation aspect. How to apply Zettelkasten in your daily workflow? I feel like this book doesn't get into the practical aspects adequately. I am working on implementing Zettelkasten within Logseq, my knowledge management system of choice. I have moved away from my legacy system, and will report back here on my after a few months to let you know how its going.
For now, I give this book a light 8.
A short and easy read, easy recognizable insight, and inspires action.
This book is written in an easy going language. It makes a convincing case for changing one's a approach to learning, then proceeds to break that change of approach up into manageable bites, and inspires the reader to get right down to it.
Can warmly recommend.
I really wasn't sure this would be worth the time, but it was far more inter esting than I could have expected. My experience with some of the methods verifies their usefulness, but there is more that the system could be doing for related ideas of memory and spaced repetition. I highly recommend this to students and writers versus many of the similar books I've seen in the space.
There aren't many books that I end thinking they are going to drastically change my life.
It's definitely the feeling I have as I close it. I realise for it to change my life, I now have to act on it, which is probably the hardest part!
[Maybe 4.5 stars? I have a couple of quibbles, mostly of the practical bent, but I think this is the next GTD: in other words, a life-changing book. Full review coming soon on my blog.]
A sort of review chadkohalyk.com/2020/06/29/a-better-process-for-reading-writing-and-thinking-zettelkasten/
Must read for everyone reading non-fiction.
Looks interesting. The note taking method is appealing compared to the bothersome usual one. Will update the rating if it actually gets good after practice, but it's at least worth a try.
Good information on techniques for better writing. I was more interested in the details of creating and using a digital slip-box, and those details are spread throughout the book as opposed to being presented in one portion of the book.
