Announcing! How to Make Notes and Write

I’m happy to announce my new book, How to Make Notes and Write. This is a project I've been planning for the last year or so, as I've been learning about a variety of tools and techniques and apps related to personal knowledge management. Many of these methods have been very helpful to me. Many apps have become part of my inventory of tools I use to collect and process ideas.

One thing I did notice, however, was that very often, a particular technique or a specific app had a set of capabilities that seemed to drive the agenda. Bi-directional linking, for example, became a key feature of several apps and as a result, people organized their note-taking around this very useful feature. And it is great to have, and opens the doors to a lot of new ways of organizing both the information inside a system and also possibly the output, which I'm excited to continue exploring.

The problem was, that these features were often a distraction and were sometimes even an impediment to building a system that would be focused on output. My primary concerns are writing and teaching (which for me also begins with writing), not having the biggest, best-connected graph. When I started trying to get information out of my system in a form that would support my writing, I discovered several flaws in the system I had adopted.

Some of these were based on my own imperfect understanding of the tools I was using, I admit. But they were still impediments to my goal, which was output. I decided I did not primarily want to become a power-user of a particular app or specific technique. I wanted to make collecting and processing ideas for output more efficient and effective.

The result is How to Make Notes and Write. It is not a manual on a new technique of zettelkasten or linked thinking or second brain building. It is focused on how to find information in sources, paraphrase it into notes, and then turn those notes into thoughts of your own. Then, unlike nearly all the descriptions I've read of PKM systems, it spends an equal amount of time on how to turn those ideas into effective and compelling output.

The reason for this difference, which I think is the main point of the book, is that it grew out of something called A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which began its life as an even shorter handbook on essay-writing that my father wrote at the University of California at Davis. The book began as a practical guide for students. I've added a front section that I thought it needed, on how to actually collect and organize the information from which people will build their output. But it remans a practical guide, rather than a theoretical review of note-taking methods and a new suggestion for how to do it better.

The main audience for this new handbook is people who want practical information on making notes - not just taking notes. The difference is that as we make notes, we take ownership of ideas that we have discovered elsewhere. But the point of this, the reason for it, is that we are going to use these ideas and the new insights that we develop by working with them, to create something of our own. I think the focus on output is key. It helped me cut to the heart of what I thought I needed in my note system and jettison or de-emphasize the less vital elements. I think it will help readers direct their attention first at developing a system that works for them, before they start trying out apps and playing with all the cool features they make available.

It's available now at https://a.co/4v7H9hZ