Note Cards

A new writing project

I'm preparing to write my "Reading, Thinking, Writing" handbook in the next six or seven weeks. It will be partly an update on my writing handbook that I wrote a couple of years ago; an expansion that relied heavily on my father's "Short Handbook" that he wrote for UC Davis in the 1990s. It will also contain a bunch of stuff I've blogged about and have probably made some videos on YouTube. But it will be all in one place and I'll probably make a new video series to go along with it, once I've got it all written down.

I want to stay pretty focused on the goal of providing a step by step guide for students and new writers. That means I'll probably wave at some stories that might be inspirational or that people might be a bit interested in (Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten or Aristotle's thoughts about argument, for example). But I probably won't try to tell an exhaustive story of how these things came to be.

I AM thinking of capturing all the main thoughts on 3x5 note cards. Actual ones, this time, rather than the simulated ones I've used in the past in apps like Scrivener, Tinderbox, Roam, or Obsidian. I'm going to be collating these ideas from a variety of sources. Many are already in my Obsidian vault, and I may link those or tag them in some way that will make them all cluster usefully in my graph. However, I think it's probably worthwhile taking the additional step of writing them out on cards. Writing rather than typing is claimed to be a more effective way of "retrieving" and solidifying information. I also think it doesn't hurt to write multiple drafts of ideas. Summarizing these points on cards will give me an opportunity to rethink each of them and state it succinctly.

Keywords and tags for main ideas will probably also emerge from this process. And then on the other end, I'll be able to arrange the cards on a physical plane such as the glass wall of my office on campus, and that will probably be helpful too.

I have several hundred blank cards, I think. And a bamboo box to put them in. A few hundred ought to be enough for this project, I think. Should only take me a week or two to put them together, since I think I've already done all the reading and note-taking I'll need to do to complete this. As I'm writing this, I'm reminded of Nassim Taleb saying he never writes anything from notes, but only out of his own head. I don't entirely believe that, unless he is channeling some of the language of Luhmann and others. If thinking is something we do when writing and by writing, then a deck of cards that contains and records that process could be thought of as "inside" rather than "outside".

In any case, I'm going to give this a try and see where it takes me. If on August first I have a completed manuscript, then it will have been a successful experiment and worth the effort.

The format of the cards, I think, will NOT be entirely zettel-ish. The front will have the content and the back will have any bibliographic info it needs. The size of the cards will limit my wordiness and encourage me to make the thoughts "atomic". The title line at the top of the card will encourage me to summarize or title the thought succinctly, which will contribute to organizing the thoughts and may provide some chapter and section titles in the final draft. But I don't think I'm going to create an elaborate numbering scheme like Luhmann did in his slip-boxes. Maybe I'll just number the notes with a count as I write them. That would be enough for me to return to them later and write a list of the way I've arranged the cards on the wall when I review them and begin constructing the chapters.

This is NOT meant to be a physical reproduction of all the functions of the Obsidian vault. I am not that concerned, here, with linking these cards in a general, all-purpose sort of way; but only in the specific way they will appear in this manuscript. So it's very output-focused. Nor do I need to tag these notes in ways that will make them visible in other contexts in the vault. This is more of a snapshot and report on the insights I've already had about these ideas than an ongoing engagement with them -- and in any case, that's still happening in my personal vault, in which nearly all of these ideas already reside. I suppose if I have a brainstorm while I'm writing or manipulating these ideas for the writing project, I can always duplicate that in the vault.

I think the other advantage of working this way is that I will be able to see my progress much more clearly. The vault is getting fairly big, so it's becoming easy for stuff to get lost in there. It will be helpful, I think, to fill a physical box with notes I can manipulate. That's the theory, at least. I'll let you know whether it works!