A Productive Week!

I was living in a hotel room with my daughter this week, while she attended a film school class in the Twin Cities. At the end of the week I also have a meeting in St. Paul, so I was going to be coming down here anyway. During the rest of the week, I have been working on finishing my update of A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I have been planning for some time to expand this beyond the practical advice for essay-writing into a “soup-to-nuts” guide for students and others interested in making effective notes and then taking the ideas they generate all the way to output.

It seemed to me there were plenty of personal knowledge management apps, systems, and books out there that promised to help folks take smart notes, link their thinking, and build a second brain. Most of these are a bit light on the output side. For example, once I have my thousands of notes in Obsidian, then what? On the other end of the spectrum, there are even more books that promise to teach you the elements of style or help you think like your editor. But how do I generate the ideas I want to write about?

How to Make Notes and Write combines the idea-generating and output-producing sides of knowledge work. It describes and demonstrates how to find ideas that interest us in sources, turn them into notes, and refine those Source Notes into interpretive ideas and trains of thought. Then it provides detailed guidance on how to transfer these ideas to a written form that can become an essay, article, book, blog, podcast, or a video/audio script. The best parts of the original handbook remain, describing in granular detail how to produce clear, concise outlines and effective paragraphs; how to choose appropriate words; and errors and pitfalls to avoid.

I think this will be a useful tool for my students, other students in my state university system (I’m going to publish it as an OER ebook), and general readers interested in practical advice on note-making and writing (there will be an inexpensive print version on Amazon, priced to cover production costs). I’ll be putting finishing touches on some of the images this weekend, and it should be available next week. I’ll announce it when it drops.