Today is my second day sitting in the atrium of what seems to have once been a King Koil mattress factory on Vandalia Avenue in St. Paul. Daughter Vivi is taking a weeklong film class in the mornings in this building and I was planning of driving to a nearby Dunn Brothers coffee shop that I used to frequent when I lived in the Cities. Turns out, this place is too comfortable and the coffee here is too good!
Yesterday I got 73 notes written, then I numbered and arranged most of them in my outline. All in the four hours Vivi was in class. Then I wrote two chapters of the handbook in the afternoon and evening, because it was a bit too hot to do anything outside (nearly 100F).
I'm pretty happy with the way this handbook is turning out, so far. I'm calling it *How to Make Notes and Write*. The intended audience is students or people who are new to note-making and writing. So it's not a direct competitor, I think, to Ahrens' and Forte's recent books, which seemed more general purpose. Actually, *How to Take Smart Notes* and *Building a Second Brain* each seemed a bit undecided about who the author was imagining as a reader. Part of this, I suppose, was an effort to cast a wide net and sell as many books as possible. I don't have that issue, exactly, since I'm giving my book away to students via the Minnesota State system's Pressbooks OER instance. I think I'll probably publish a paper edition of the book on Amazon, at a price that covers its cost of production. But the point won't be to sell thousands of copies.
So far, I've written some idea chapters, about the ideas of note-making. As I move forward, I'm going to try to delve into details. One of the flaws of Ahrens' book, I thought, was that he didn't really *demonstrate*, much less completely explain, exactly how to do the things he was talking about. Part of this may have to do with trying to remain agnostic about tools, but I think in the end it weakened readers' understanding of how to do the process he advocates.
My new friend Scott Scheper is pretty direct with his argument that "Ahrensian" note-taking is NOT what Luhmann did. This is of more than academic interest, if Luhmann's system worked and Ahrens' doesn't. I suspect, though, that there's some potential variability between what we call the notes, how many particular types we have, etc. I'm going to try to focus on the process of incrementally improving the ideas I'm working with, from a sort-of direct engagement with thoughts from different sources to a final form in which the focus is how the idea fits into my own projects. I think this is the main point I want to teach my students, too.
This handbook is going to focus quite a bit more on the writing process, too. Ahrens sort-of short-changed that area, I thought. "And then, you write". Tiago really had nothing to say about writing. So this will be a bit more nuts and bolts, which makes sense since it originated as my father's *Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities*.
I'm going to call my first stage "Highlights", because that's what my notes at this point typically consist of. This is really a bit of a collection -- and that is probably what is bothering me about my Obsidian vault. Too many unprocessed Readwise sweeps of Kindle highlights or Hypothesis annotations. I suppose it isn't impossible to find info I'm looking for among those notes, although it's no easier or more useful that a spotlight search of my hard drive. The frustration is there is too much stuff in there, and it's hard to see the stuff I care about. This is what drove me to begin making my Source Notes (that's my name for Ahrens' "Literature Notes") on cards. I'm calling the final stage "Point Notes" as a reminder that they should be about a point I'm trying to make, not merely a reaction to a source.
The biggest part of the new discipline, for me, is the part where I look at the note and figure out where it FITS in the train of thought I'm working through. It's a slow process, but it sometimes results in new thoughts about how the idea might connect to others. That, I think, is what I'm looking for.