Taking Note of Note Taking

I often find myself typing in most of a chapter or article that I’m reading or cutting and pasting like mad with very little commenting, highlighting or the like.

Maybe I would be a better student if notes were a bit harder to take, say with a pencil rather than a laptop. I might be driven to be more salient and concise, more judicious and active in my reading, summarising and evaluating rather than reguretatting: more scholar than typewriter.

When I was at university first time round I did everything with pen and paper and would get through a stack of books tolerably (i.e. intro, conclusion, contents page & index) each week and end up with some notes in a file and an essay. I’m not sure my work rate has increased or my essays got much better for all the rearranging blocks of text and the footnote fuss. “Driver argued that” or “As Westermann comment” seemed perfectly good citations then. There is certainly a law of diminishing returns here.

I dread to think what voice recognition software might do to my notes. Sections might often begin: “And d’y know, in a funny sort a’ way, maybe…”. It is likely, however, that a naturally speaking Dragon would have better spelling than me.