https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Initial stab at a definition of "active reading"

Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.

Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

I've been heavily focused on note making while reading to the detriment of the different form of note making for lectures.

61 Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Rev. and updated ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 45.

I see some of the sense of this footnote, which helps to establish some ethos by calling to mind Adler/Van Doren's classic, but this particular page in their text is really about paying enough attention not to fall asleep and thus doesn't underline Scheper's point as well as references to other portions of their book about goals and active reading.

Adler and Van Doren indicate that outlining the arguments and structure of a book on its endpapers is a better and higher measurement of one's ownership of a text compared to a bookplate which only indicates the lower level of "financial" ownership.

Active reading is thinking, and thinking requires expression which can come in many forms including both spoken and written ones.

I like that he acknowledges that expression (and thus thinking) can be done in both oral or written forms.

The authors don't cover it, but the skimming portion of inspectional reading helps one to build some of the context which the author is attempting to relay. Preloading some of this context will decrease one's mental burden when more deeply and actively attempting to consume a text.

source?

Where is the origin of this reading analogy?

note that they're incorrectly capitalizing these types of reading to indicate their importance.

This list is a great framework for showing students what they don't know, so they can actively work and practice at becoming better at their craft.

I feel like actively annotating and "reading with a pen in hand" has been a great way to practice many of these points. Questioning texts, marking open problems, etc. goes a long way toward practicing these methods.

Joseph Harris uses a mélange of materials to make his writing including books, papers, magazines, from which he is copying sections out, writing in margins, making notes on index cards and then moving those pieces of text and pieces of paper (the index cards, and possibly Post-it notes) around to create his output.

He doesn't delineate a specific process for his excerpting or note taking practice. How does he organize his notes? Is he just pulling them from piles around him? Is there a sense of organization at all?

Courtney, Jennifer Pooler. “A Review of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1 (2007): 74–77.

Review of: Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248.

Are some of the critical reading methods they're framing here similar to or some of the type found at Project Zero (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines)?

Du Boulay, 1999; Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008<br /> Noticing that they've left these references off of the end of the paper.

If we measure what we care about, why don't we do more grading and assessment of students' evidence of reading in addition to their writing? If we looked more closely at note taking and understanding first and foremost, would the ultimate analysis sort itself out? Instead we look only at the end products instead of the process. Focus more on the process and first class work here and the results will take care of themselves.

cross reference:

take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves (see: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_care_of_the_pennies_and_the_pounds_will_take_care_of_themselves)

More effective than what? Just highlighting? What does Ahmad show? Is there a hierarchy of strategies that have been cross tested with larger groups? What effect does a depth and breadth of neurodiverse subjects show, for example?

This is the my first encounter with REAP.

REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate, Ponder.

Has anyone done direct research on commonplacing or zettelkasten techniques to show concrete data to compare them with other currently more popular techniques like Cornell notes or REAP?

Read for potential methods and set up for a potential meta study: Ahmad, S. Z. (2019). Impact of Cornell Notes vs. REAP on EFL secondary school students’ critical reading skills. International Education Studies, 12(10), 60-74

What results do Brown et al show exactly? How do they dovetail with the citations and material in Ahrens2017 on these topics?

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=3301452

Ahrens, doesn't provide a full citation of Brown, but does quote it for the same broad purpose (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8ewTno3pEeydaHscXVaIzw) specifically with respect to the idea that highlighting doesn't help in the learning process, yet students still actively do it.

Hypothes.is “Are Your Students Doing the Reading? Seven Strategies for Motivating Students to Complete the Course Reading.” Hypothes.is, August 22, 2022. https://docdrop.org/pdf/Are-Your-Students-Doing-the-Rea---Hypothes.is-gaulj.pdf/

Minzetanu, Andrei. “Reading to Quote or Ars Legendi as Ars Excerpendi.” Litterature, December 1, 2012, 31. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290606505_Reading_to_Quote_or_Ars_Legendi_as_Ars_Excerpendi

Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)

Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.

Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170429050031/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2013/08/underlining-in-library-books.html

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books/

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/wue2ex/looking_for_books_with_wider_margins_for/

Not long after I posted this it had about 3 upvotes, including my automatic 1. It's now at 0, and there are several responses about not writing in books at all. It seems like this particular book community is morally opposed to writing in one's books! 🤣

Why though? There's a tremendously long tradition of writing in books, and probably more so when they were far more expensive! Now they're incredibly inexpensive commodities, so why should we be less inclined to write in them, particularly when there's reasonable evidence of the value of doing so?

I might understand not writing in library books as part of their value within the commons, but https://booktraces.org/ indicates that almost 12% or more of the books they've tracked prior to 1924 have some sort of mark, writing, or evidence that it was actively read.

Given what I know of the second hand markets, it's highly unlikely that my books (marked up or not) will ever be read by another person.

There's so much more to say here, but I just haven't the time today...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EExZkzMM

Quick outline of how Holiday reads, annotates, and then processes the ideas from books into his index card-based commonplace book.

One of the toughest parts about these systems is that while they're relatively easy to outline (evidence: the thousands of 500-1000 word blog posts about zettelkasten in the last 3 years), they're tougher to practice and many people have slight variations on the idea (from Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" to Luhmann's (still incomplete) digital collection). Far fewer people are sticking with it beyond a few weeks or doing it for crazy reasons (I call it #ProductivityPorn, while Scott has the colorful phrase "bubble graph boys").

For those who visit here, seeing discrete cards and ideas, videos, or examples of how others have done this practice can be immensely helpful. While it can be boring to watch a video of someone reading and taking notes by hand, it can also be incredibly useful to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it (though God bless you for speeding them up 😅).

This is also part of why I share examples of how others have practiced these techniques too. Seeing discrete examples to imitate is far easier than trying to innovate your way into these methods, particularly when it's difficult to see the acceleration effects of serendipity that comes several months or years into the process. Plus it's fun to see how Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Roland Barthes, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, John Locke, and Eminem all did variations of this for themselves. (This last sentence has so much entropy in it, I'm certain that it's never been written before in the history of humanity.)

And isn't everyone tired to death of Luhmann, Luhmann, Luhmann? You'd think that no one had ever thought to take note of anything before?!

While my own approach is a hybrid of online and offline techniques, I've gotten long emails from people following my Hypothes.is feed of notes and annotations saying what a useful extended example it is. Of course they don't see the follow up that entails revision of the notes or additional linking, tagging, and indexing that may go on, but it's at least enough of an idea that they understand the start of the practice.

(Incidentally, I wrote most of this using a few cards from my own system. 🗃️✂️🖋️)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHw-WdiNbw

Example of someone's explicit note taking practice. While there's some missing context hiding without pre-knowledge of what a zettelkasten is, it's an n interesting example for modeling purposes for beginners.

Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)

My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3dbH2c3l0M

Templater scripts: - My Clippings: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/296 - Extract highlights to create mini-summary draft: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/294

This could be interesting to attempt on a book.

Active reading to the extreme!

What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

The typical student note taking method of transcribing, using (or often not using at all), and keeping notes is doomed to failure.

Many students make the mistake of not making their own actual notes. By this I don't mean they're not writing information down. In fact many are writing information down, but we can't really call these notes. Notes by definition ought to transform something seen or heard into one's own words. Without the transformation, these students think that they're taking notes, but in reality they're focusing their efforts on being transcriptionists. They're attempting to capture something for later consumption. This is a deadly trap! By only transcribing, they're not taking advantage of transforming information by putting ideas down in their own words to test their understanding. Often worse, even if they do transcribe notes, they don't revisit them. If they do revisit them, they're simply re-reading them and not actively working with them. Only re-reading them will lead to the illusion that they're learning something when in fact they're falling into the mere-exposure effect.

Students who are acting as transcriptionists would be better off simply reading a textbook and taking notes directly from that.

A note that isn't revisited or revised, may as well be a note not taken. If we were to consider a spectrum of useful, valuable, and worthwhile notes, these notes would be at the lowest end of the spectrum.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/QgkL6IkIEeym7OeN9v9New

The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.

This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.

How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?

Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.

For reading richer, denser texts what is the best way of ordering and sorting it?

Algorithmically sorting with a pseudo-chronological sort is the best method for social media content, but what is the most efficient method for journal articles? for books?

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Footnote:

Sacchini (1614)—further references to “Sacchini” will be to this edition; warm thanks to Helmut Zedelmaier for sharing with me his photocopy of this edition. Further editions include: Sammieli (Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine), 1615; Ingolstadt 1616; Bordeaux 1617; Dillingen 1621; Leipzig 1711 and 1738; and Venetiis Britonum (Vannes, Brittany), 1866. It was translated into French (Sacchini [1786]) and German, Über die Lektüre, ihren Nutzen und die Vortheile sie gehörig anzuwenden, nach dem Lateini- Notes to Pages 70–72 283 schen des Sacchini teutsch bearbeitet und mit einem Anhange begleitet von Herrmann Walchner (Karlsruhe, 1832). I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for the information about the German edition, which I have not seen. Sacchini’s De ratione . . . legendi was a source for Rainierio Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi (Rome, 1709), as discussed in Haskell (2003), 260. For the full range of Jesuit practices of note-taking (including notes taken under dictation) see Nelles (2007)—I am grateful to Paul Nelles for helpful conversations over the years. On Sacchini, see also Dainville (1978), 224–27.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I44oMVd4Cw

Become a Better Reader in 8 Minutes - Write down basic Impressions - Write actionable takeaways - Limit it to 10 items to create a level of selection - Create a list of favorite quotes - Bonus section: Catch all for other important tidbits. Also good for important questions.

This is useful for its brevity and actionability, but it's also glossing over so much more that could be valuable. It specifically is leaving out methods and means of actively reusing all these written notes. No mention of reviews of the material or spaced repetition.

Saw this via YouTube algorithm.

For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.

Understanding the sorts of questions an author is looking at and attempting to answer are often more important than going through a checklist of biases which may come into play.

Coming to a text with too rigid a set of questions or preconceived categories may cause you to be blinded by what you expect to get out of it rather than allowing the text to surprise you with new and interesting insights you may not have anticipated.

The zettelkasten is a tool for thought that forces you to engage more deeply with what you're reading.

Brandon Lewis seems to be talking about actively taking two papers and placing them "in dialogue with each other" potentially by reading, annotating, and writing about them with himself as an intermediary.

https://highlighted.app/

Highlighted.app Tagline: "Capture, organize and revisit important parts of your books."

Apple iOS only

Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?

Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?

Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvke-vriQbY

Morgan Eua talks about her active reading practice for fiction and non-fiction and how she transcribes her notes into Obsidian.

https://only-the-questions.glitch.me/

A tool for extracting all the questions out of a particular text.

Via: https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d

Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]

It's important to be able to understand an idea within it's given text fully, but good readers are able to take the idea and place it into other contexts, to extend it, connect it to ideas beyond the text, and ask additional questions that the original author may not have considered or even thought possible.

Page numbers are terrible for anything other than looking up a location or citing where a quote is from, it provides little meaningful organizational context.

In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.

In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.

He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]

In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!

I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.

What methods of studying actually make us learn something versus make us feel as if we've learned something?

Active reading, progressive summarization may be on this list while highlighting and underlining might not. Or perhaps there's a spectrum of poor to good, and if this is the case, what does it look like? Is it the same for everyone or are factors like neurodivergence part of the equation which might change this spectrum of learning methods and techniques?

Active reading with a pen in your hand and the creation of smart notes is a small-scale equivalent of a full introductory lecture from the perspective of Richard Feynman's technique for testing understanding.

Active reading is roughly equivalent to the idea of reading with a pen in your hand or showing evidence of a mind at play.

Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

An active reader is always thinking, writing, and annotating. The notes from this process can and could easily be used to facilitate writing and generating new material showing new contexts and new modes of thought.

I appreciate how he puts some priority in note taking, but it does matter what your read.

Better:

It matters both what you read and how you take notes.

An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.

Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.

Where did the idea of speed reading being a measure of our intelligence stem?

Certainly in a world of information overload there is the perception that greater consumption is better, but lack of comprehension and memory are the enemies.

Comprehension and the ability to remember the books we read should be of the utmost importance.

Nice to see him pay some homage to orality here.

-Mortimer J. Adler

The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

Karnofsky suggests that the cost/benefit ratio of how we typically think of reading may not be as simple as we intuitively expect i.e. we think that 'more time' = 'more understanding'.

If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.

A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.

That being said, if your goal is to develop expertise, both Karnofsky and Adler ('How to read a book') suggest that you need a deep engagement with multiple texts.

https://fs.blog/2021/08/remember-books/

A solid overview of how to read. Not as long or as in-depth as Mortimer J. Adler, but hits all of the high points in an absorbable manner.

Definitely worth re-reading...

This is a good list of questions to put into a template to ask both while and after reading a book.

What other regularly recurring questions might go into such a list?

on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing

highlight is a quote from

C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]

John Milton's commonplace book was an exercise in moral philosophy and it was compiled for action, not just a collection.

Reading is a receptive active undertaking in the same way as a catcher receiving a pitch in baseball.

How much more active can it be than also actively annotating and note taking?

This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

I've recently shifted into a frame of mind where I think that, if I'm reading something (something that isn't obviously news or entertainment), I should be making notes. If I'm not making notes, then I'm probably wasting my time reading that particular piece of content.

This is a specific strategy to include in an active reading session.

Does the slow reading movement parallel the slow food one? In some ways, there might be a point against “consumption” in both cases. Or, at least, utilitarianism.

Besides the piece’s content, the interactions which happened through a layer of Diigo annotations were quite interesting.

Might want to add yet another layer to this old discussion.