article
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the spec just says: “Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a
<br />, but a simplistic “every line break is a<br />” rule wouldn’t work for Markdown. " ↩︎ -
but don’t take my word for it, what do I know? Read the book and the close reading archive. ↩︎
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Using the Zettelkasten (or Bibliography Apparatus) as a Database
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Collecting Reading Notes without writing Permanent Notes
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Treating Blank Reading Notes as “To Read” list
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Forgetting to write notes while reading
- write atomic notes,
- write in Markdown syntax,
- link notes easily,
- re-combine notes by transclusion,
- easily search through all my notes without clutter; and
- export notes without stress.
Semantic line breaks are a feature of Markdown, not a bug
My writing process often begins with Markdown, a simple syntax for publication on the web.
I love Markdown, but one thing has always bugged me.
It’s a quirk of Markdown that simple line breaks are ignored, so that multi-line text in the source document becomes one long paragraph in the rendered html output.
In other words, simply pressing Enter doesn’t result in a <br /> linebreak.
Here’s what I mean.
You can see the difference between the original Markdown text and the output rendered in html:
This is a sentence. Now I’ve started a new line, but I simply pressed ‘enter’. Look, I did it again. In the Markdown original, this shows up as separate sentences. But in the processed html it’s all one long paragraph. Yes, one long paragraph, which you’re reading right now. So is this a bug or a feature? Is it a feature or a bug? I added two spaces to the previous line to start a new paragraph.
A blank line has a more pronounced effect.
I’ve previously found this behaviour a bit annoying, but today I learned about semantic line breaks via sembr.org and it has completely changed the way I see line breaks working.
From now on I’ll just write every sentence on its own line, and then choose where I want the paragraphs to break, simply by ending the line with two spaces.
What’s the benefit?
This way I get to clarify my thoughts by limiting each sentence or clause to a single vertical line, while Markdown makes the paragraph formatting prettier for my readers.
As the semantic line break specification suggests,
By inserting line breaks at semantic boundaries, writers, editors, and other collaborators can make source text easier to work with, without affecting how it’s seen by readers.
I’m not sure the creators of Markdown intended this1, but it’s how it works, and I can now take advantage of it. It used to bug me, but from now on it’s a feature.
This is an example of something simple that might be obvious to you, but which I didn’t understand till now. Do you have any other examples of similar obvious things that others may have overlooked? Or things you have overlooked that others find obvious? If so,I’d love to hear about them.
Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all
“My notes were like plans for a bridge”.
I’ve argued that you can’t create good writing just by mashing your notes together and hoping for the best. That’s the illusion of connected thought, I’ve said, because you can’t create coherent writing just from a pile of notes.
Well, maybe I was wrong.
Perhaps a strong or experienced writer can do exactly that. Here’s John Gregory Dunne, the journalist husband of Joan Didion, in the Foreword to his 1968 book on Hollywood, The Studio:
I imagine he wasn’t just a good writer, though.
Surely he was first a very good note-maker.
I’d like to hear about people’s experiences, good and bad, of using their notes to create longer pieces of writing. Was it like building a bridge, or perhaps like building a bridge out of jelly?
HT: Alan Jacobs, who draws a different but very valid lesson from the anecdote.
Stay in the Writing Slowly loop and never miss a thing (unless you don’t get round to opening your emails, in which case, yeah, you might miss a thing. Anyway:
Read better, read closer
For anyone seeking clues on better techniques for reading, Scott Newstok, author of How to Think Like Shakespeare, has created a marvelous resource: a close reading archive. Here is where all your close reading questions will be answered, including, what is it? how do you do it? what have people done with it? and does it have a future in a digital age?
Close reading is one of those two-word phrases that seem to take on a life of their own. Anyone connected to the humanities has probably heard of it, but it’s not necessarily well understood. Is it finished? Apparently not. Not at all.
Professor Newstok’s close reading archive is an openly available companion to John Guillory’s cultural history, On Close Reading, published January 2025.
Newstok is also editor of a book on Montaigne’s view of teaching, which is how I discovered Gustave Flaubert’s endorsement of what might perhaps be seen as a kind of close reading avant la lettre1:
“Read Montaigne, read him slowly, carefully! He will calm you . . . Read him from one end to the other, and, when you have finished, try again . . . But do not read, as children read, for fun, or as the ambitious read, to instruct you. No. Read to live.”
Now consider: three ways to make notes while reading.
For even more, please subscribe.
Improve your notes (and your life) with two-word phrases
Since my notes are mainly modular, it’s fairly easy to connect two seemingly separate ideas or concepts to create a new one.
I’m intrigued by how important this activity of recombination has been in the history of innovation. For example, in 1929 the American inventor Edwin Link took the vacuum tubes, motors and bellows from his family’s player piano business and reconfigured them to create the Link Trainer. Despite its improbable origin and strikingly bad looks, this was a pioneering flight simulator that during World War 2 trained nearly half a million pilots. And it was made out of organ parts!
As I’ve said before, from fragments you can build a greater whole.
A phrase made only of two juxtaposed words, like ‘flight simulator’, can be a remarkably evocative thing. Choose the right two words and as if by magic, you’ve created a memorable phrase, a new brand, or even the kernel of an innovative technology.
In the social sciences they have been termed sensitizing concepts - which itself is a kind of two-word brand. When they’re working well, such phrases don’t really define something, rather they evoke it. In 1954 the sociologist Herbert Blumer, who originated that phrase, offered some examples from his field:
“mores, social institutions, attitudes, social class, value, cultural norm, personality, reference group, social structure, primary group, social process, social system, urbanization, accommodation, differential discrimination and social control…”
Note how many of these sensitizing concepts are two-word phrases. And note how many of these are still in use today. Pretty much all of them, although I’m not sure ‘differential discrimination’ trips off the tongue…
Such phrases are tremendously evocative. Once you’ve seen a concept like ‘social class’ or ‘cultural norm’, your whole world shifts slightly and it’s hard to un-see it.
Think, too, of some more recent examples, such as ‘tipping point’, ‘bowling alone’, ‘shock doctrine’, ‘atomic habits’. In each of these cases, the ability of the thinker to invent and develop the apposite phrase has effectively made their careers.
If the phrase is strong enough, it brands the originator with no further explanation needed. Even a seemingly awkward phrase, at the right time, can break out into popular recognition. Take ‘intersectional feminism’ - a concept that took a while to get going but then seemed to be everywhere and remains indelibly linked to the name of its originator, Kimberlé Crenshaw.
And then there’s ‘brain rot’, a term first coined in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden.
Fully 170 years later, brain rot was named as the Oxford word of the year for 2024. Well, sometimes it takes a moment for an idea to catch on. But in the end, ‘brain rot’ beat several shortlisted words, including ‘dynamic pricing’. Thoreau, incidentally, had an intriguing working method, where he saw his written thoughts as ‘nesteggs’.
In the world of business, the two-word phrase dominates. Think of Home Depot, Mastercard, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, FaceBook, Instagram, Bitcoin or even that parody two word brand, TikTok. Ironically perhaps, TikTok is specifically named as having helped make brain rot a discussion point.
There are endless definitive products known by two words cleverly jammed together by marketers in search of a trademark: Band-Aid, Chapstick (or is it lip balm?), bubble wrap, dry ice, fibreglass, ping pong, super glue and super-heroes, video tape, memory stick, cell phone and crock-pot.
Meanwhile, in the German-speaking world, they’ve created a whole culture from compound nouns. It must be the Zeitgeist 1.
Back in the Anglo-sphere, though2, whether its a product (vegan cheese) or a concept (standpoint epistemology), the two-word phrase rules. I’d go so far as to suggest that for any idea to gain an audience it could benefit from the two word treatment.
This ubiquity not only helps with promoting your bright idea, it also helps to show how to discover your bright idea in the first place. Just think of two previously unrelated concepts or objects and join them together. Mostly this won’t work, but sometimes, just sometimes, it will.
I used to live in the United Kingdom3, where the pubs4 sell ‘pork scratchings’. Sadly this is a popular snack, which is just wrong. Although, I will reluctantly concede that if you’re going to eat something called ‘scratchings’, you might do worse than the pork variety.
This illustrates a caution I want to end with: there may only be two words at stake, but you have to choose the right two words. Who ever heard of a car depot, a car stack or a car field? No, it’s obviously a car park.
Unless, that is, it’s obviously a parking station.
I’d love to hear what two-word phrases you’ve coined lately. And if you don’t want to miss out on writingslowly, you are strongly advised to subscribe to my weekly(ish) news letter. It’s like a blog but more fashionable because it’s an email. Now that’s progress!
References:
Blumer, Herbert. 1954. “What is Wrong with Social Theory.” American Sociological Review 18: 3-10.
Davis, Kathy. 2008. ‘Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful’. Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700108086364.
Richmond, Michele. The Etymology of Parking. Arnoldia – Volume 73, Issue 2 The Etymology of Parking - Arnold Arboretum PDF
Image by Bzuk (talk) - Own work (Original text: I (Bzuk (talk)) created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, Link
Year in books for 2024
Happy New Year!
Here are some of the books I finished reading in 2024.
Happy New Year!
Do you have annual reading goals? And do you kep a record of your reading? I posted a little gallery of the books I finished reading in 2024. Micro.blog, the web service I use, is great for this. But it only works if I actually use it! Which is why only some of my reading was captured.
So my reading resolution for 2025 is to be more systematic in recording my reading.
In the past few years I’ve set a target. This has helped me to understand my reading cadence, but now I know it, I don’t really need a target any more. It’s not like there’s a big reward to be had for reading 1000 books a year!
How about you? How do you keep track? What works? And do you have any specific book goals for 2025?
Zettelkasten anti-patterns
When developing your Zettelkasten, your collection of linked notes, what have you learned not to do?
Mathematician Alex Nelson keeps a paper Zettelkasten, and has posted online about how he does it. He calls this Zettelkasten best practices.
But Nelson also lists some ‘worst practices’ to avoid, which he calls anti-patterns.
So I’m wondering, do you have any other examples of ‘Zettelkasten anti-patterns’ from your own experience?
For reference, here are the ‘anti-patterns’ Nelson identifies. I’m not going to explain these here, though, because you can read the post for yourself:
Are there any more Zettelkasten worst practices, and how have you avoided them?
Atomic notes and the unit record principle
Thinking about atomic notes
Researcher Andy Matuschak talks about atomicity in notes, an idea also developed by the creators of the Archive note app, at zettelkasten.de.
To make a note ‘atomic’ is to emphasise a single idea rather than several. An atomic note is simplex rather than multiplex. And this form of simplicity relates to the idea of ‘separation of concerns’ in computer programming.
Back to the unit record principle
But the idea is much older than this. I found something very similar described in 1909, in The Story of Library Bureau.
How to write a better note without melting your brain
There’s a great line in Bob Doto’s book [A System for Writing][2] which goes like this:
“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.”
Haven’t you ever looked at your notes and had the same thought? So much potential… yet so little actual 🫠.
Perhaps you jotted something down a couple of days or weeks ago and returning to it now you can’t remember what you meant to say, or what you were thinking of at the time.
Or perhaps you made a great note then, but now you can’t find it.
Or maybe you just know your note connects to another great thought… but you can’t for the life of you remember what.
Well I already make plenty of half-baked notes like these, but how can I make them better? It’s not something they teach in school, so most of us don’t even realize there’s untapped potential, if only we could access it.
So, how can I make worthwhile notes from my almost illegible scribbles on the fly? Well, here’s what works for me. Maybe it’ll work for you too.
When writing my notes, I just have a few simple rules that I mostly stick to:
Not just notes: another meaning of 'Zettel'
In German, Zettelkasten, quite simply, means ‘note box’. But there’s another, more hidden meaning of the word Zettel (note) that even German-speakers may know nothing of.
All the same, it’s useful for thinking with.
Busybody, hunter, dancer - which is your curiosity style?
Are you curious about your world? If so, what does your curiosity look like? How does it feel, and how does it move? And could you expand your repertoire of curiosity?
In other words, could you practise curiousity differently?
Three styles of curiosity - so which one is yours?
I’m interested in what it means to be curious. So I was intrigued by a new study about curiosity that I found via The Conversation.
The study examined the different ways nearly half a million Wikipedia users read their way through its massive network of articles. It turns out these can be characterised as three different styles of curiosity.
The authors write:
“By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we replicate two styles of curiosity previously identified in laboratory studies: the nomadic “busybody” and the targeted “hunter.” Further, we find evidence for another style—the “dancer””.
And what are these different styles? In very brief summary:
Why not make notes by hand?
So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies
While clearing out my desk recently I found a USB thumb drive with a whole heap of old note-taking apps on it. This drive dates from 2017, not even seven years ago, but it seems like ancient history.
These note-taking apps come and go and the only ones worthwhile IMHO are the ones with a format you can keep using, or at least access. Several, I’m happy to say, had easily re-usable plain text files in a ‘data’ folder or similar.
So why am I mentioning this?
The truth according to Trump
Alan Jacobs rightly observes that Trump supporters don’t care about the ‘truth’ of their claims.
He’s spot on to point out that the purpose of the constant barrage of egregious lying is to mock the idea that truth matters, and to gather a constituency of people who are in on the joke.
And certainly, there’s no point trying to correct these outlandish claims, as though their pushers ever cared a fig about the facts of the matter. They don’t.
How to write an article from your notes - an example
In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.
Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.
The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.
They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.
An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.
Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes
I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.
Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?
If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.
How to get Strata for micro.blog up and running
I’ve decided to make use of the ‘notes’ feature in micro.blog.
This is like making private posts in a blog. But my main use case is brainstorming future blog posts. I want to take notes of half-formed ideas, which may or may not end up as blog posts. They’re not quite draft quality, but I have a hunch they’ll end up as public posts, not just remain as private notes.
The Notes feature is very easy to use. You make notes from the main page by clicking on the ‘Notes’ menu item.
And you can set up multiple ‘notebooks’, which you can rename at will.
But there’s also an iOS app called Strata to make the experience easy and fun. That’s what I wanted to try.
Feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes: Jane Austen's timely advice for writers and creators
Jane Austen died in the cathedral city of Winchester on July 18, 1817; she was 41 years old.
Towards the end of her too-short life, in a brief five-year period between 1811 and 1816, she published four great novels. Originally released anonymously to a just a handful of positive reviews and scant financial success, these works are now among the most celebrated in the English language.
My favourite tool is this notebook I made
I couldn’t find a note-making app that really suited me so I made one myself.
OK, that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s really just a heavily modified version of TiddlyWiki but it feels tailor-made. And working with it fits me like a glove. It’s a great example of making a creative working environment. That’s important. You have to make your own environment. Some people hate TiddlyWiki[^1]. That’s fine too.
I wanted a notemaking environment that would let me:
Here’s how I made my personalised notemaking app.