An excellent way tomake the important points stand out is to read the entire set of notes verycarefully, underlining the more vital points in red ink. Such a method willmake them stand out from the rest and give the eye a scale of values moreeasily remembered.
The suggestion of visual highlighting making ideas stand out, but without the idea of their location within the notes being a helpful part of the mnemonic technique.
First, I mixed the conversational notes in with my other thoughts. But I’ve since found that keeping the conversational notes separate from other notes is better—it creates a stronger sense of place. Now, I enter the Torbjörn notes, and all past conversations flow up. Mixed in with the other notes, they were diluted.
Like the affordances with respect to memory, giving notes a "place" can give them additional power.
There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully
General methods of annotating or marking a text:<br /> - underlining, circling, boxing, enclosing, or highlighting - vertical lines in margin - stars, asterisks, symbols, dogears, (implied: bookmarks) - numbers sequencing arguments - page numbers as cross references - writing in the margin: questions and answers - writing in the endpapers
Are there other methods and marks that aren't catalogued here?
The idea of drolleries used as mnemonics is one which quickly comes to mind.
They do mention cross-references to page numbers within the text, but fail to mention links to ideas in other texts. (Perhaps they cover this later under syntopical reading and marking?)
J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to memory.
A line in the margin doesn't fit with any mnemotechniques I'm aware of, so it's more likely a method to indicate what he had read, and up to what point. Likely not an indicator of storage to memory.
According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’.