article
- rough notes and annotations (written anywhere) ->
- main notes (Zettelkasten) ->
- structure notes (working towards outlines) ->
- early drafts ->
- edited drafts ->
- final drafts ->
- final final drafts LOL
- published work
-
as Virginia Woolf famously claimed, about 15 years later ↩︎
- around the world, caring for others has been criminalised by shameless lawmakers
- in defiance, people are doing it anyway; care is a political practice of solidarity (that’s why the right tries to attack it)
- we need to challenge another, sinister two-word phrase: organised abandonment.
-
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. ↩︎
-
Using the Zettelkasten (or Bibliography Apparatus) as a Database
-
Collecting Reading Notes without writing Permanent Notes
-
Treating Blank Reading Notes as “To Read” list
-
Forgetting to write notes while reading
Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to
It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?
I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.
Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.
He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.
Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:
“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”
By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.
That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.
“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’
According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.
In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:
“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”
Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:
“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”
Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.
If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.
That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.
In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.
Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.
The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:
“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”
Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.
So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.
Footnote:
Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.
“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion
Acknowledgement
Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?
References
Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.
Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.
Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…
Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary
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The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive
Georges Didi-Huberman’s extensive collection of over 148,000 notes exemplifies the enduring relevance and creativity of the Zettelkasten method in art and philosophy.
Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes
Note-taking should mainly serve as a means to enable writing rather than being an exhaustive record of knowledge. At least, that’s my approach.
My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts
Writing, at least for me, seems to be a messy, back-and-forth kind of thing. It’s a seemingly never-ending loop of laying ideas down, arranging them in some kind of order, and then wrangling them into something that vaguely resembles coherence. It would be nice to imagine that writing is just a matter of sticking a bunch of pre-existing notes together like a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s just wishful thinking. In reality, it’s more like collage created with scissors and glue — messy, iterative, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.
Here, I’m laying out my personal writing workflow, some thoughts on drafting (and redrafting, and re-redrafting), and how I juggle note-making with actually getting words onto the page.
A basic writing workflow
My basic writing workflow is:
A key venue for my rough (fleeting) notes is my daily journal. I write freely about anything and everything, then excerpt interesting stuff into a proper note (aka a main note).
Writing involves drafting and re-drafting
It’s not very realistic to imagine producing completed work simply by mashing together the contents of my notes, nor to create finished writing just from a pile of notes. That’s an attractive but hollow illusion However, my notes certainly help the drafting process tremendously.
It’s tempting to make light of the amount of work the drafting and redrafting takes, but for me it remains a substantial part of the writing process. The Zettelkasten offers a massive head start though, because it means I always have material to work with and because it’s a workshop in which to play with the structure and order of my ideas. It also allows me to continuously develop my unfinished thoughts.
What to do with new thoughts while writing
I use my Zettelkasten notes to construct and inform drafts, but during the drafting process a new thought might come to me, or I’ll notice an idea that I need to add to or expand.
By this time though, I’m already well into the drafting and editing, so I don’t usually go back to create more notes. Perhaps I should, but that would interrupt the flow of the editing work. The exception is when I realise I need to leave the draft and do some more involved thinking/writing. I’ll usually do this by means of my Zettelkasten.
The consolation to not making more notes is that if I’ve actually finished a piece of writing, I can always cite that as a source in a future note, should the occasion arise. This has been a bit of a process of trial and error. Make too few notes to start with, and my drafting process feels under-fed.
There’s no ideal number of notes
It takes quite a lot of notes before I’m happily drafting a piece of writing. But I’m not really sure what the ideal number of notes would be to create a certain length of finished work, and I suspect there isn’t really a definitive way to know that.
That said, I heard an interview with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators), where he mentioned that while writing a book he makes 200-300 notes on index cards prior to writing each chapter. (Link - 32 minutes onwards). That may seem like a lot, but each of these notes may contain just a few words.
Meanwhile, for each book he reads, author Robert Greene writes very approximately ten notes:
“After going through several dozen books, I might have three hundred cards, and from those cards I see patterns and themes that coalesce into hardcore chapters. I can then thumb through the cards and move them around at will. For many reasons I find this an incredible way to shape a book.” (Source)
When to stop writing notes and start writing drafts
So when does the note-making stop and the drafting start? Again, I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer to this question. Start too early and I don’t have enough material. Start too late and I’ve gathered far more material than I can use. Perhaps the ‘Goldilocks’ moment - when there are just enough notes to make a worthwhile first draft - becomes clearer with experience. Further, I find that starting a draft makes it easier to see what my writing is missing, so the note-making and the drafting overlap in time to a significant extent.
Towards the end of his career, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, godfather of the Zettelkasten approach, increasingly worked on the many unfinished manuscripts he had started, rather than on creating lots of new Zettelkasten notes. His Zettelkasten had been so productive that it had helped him write far more manuscripts than he had time to publish. Several of these have been edited and published after his death, and I understand there might be more still to come, since the gigantic task of digitising his archive isn’t due for completion till 2030.
At the end of the day, my writing process isn’t just about jotting down thoughts—it’s about playing with them, reworking them, and eventually, after plenty of trial and error, shaping them into something worth reading. My Zettelkasten system helps keep the whole chaotic process from completely derailing, but the real magic (or struggle, depending on the day) happens in the drafts. There’s no cut-and-dried answer to when to stop taking notes and start writing—too soon and I’m flailing, too late and I’m drowning in material. Over time, though, I’ve started to get a feel for the back-and-forth of it.
Maybe writing is less about finding the perfect method and more about learning to live with the imperfections of the process. Or maybe that’s just me.
How do you work? Please let me know.
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Artwork by Louise Bourgeois. I saw this at an exhibiton of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW.
What comes after content?
A few weeks ago I happened to win a voucher for the mainstream cinema chain in Sydney where I live.
I checked what was showing, and as a result didn’t even bother claiming the voucher. The kind of ‘top’ movies on offer are really not what I could imagine enjoying. Even if I did enjoy Marvel superhero movies, I can’t imagine wanting to see 45 of them (Wikipedia).
The decline of cinema is a bit sad, because I’ve loved going to the movies ever since the days when my aunt took me to see The Jungle Book, and since my dad took himself (and me) to the first Star Wars movie, and since even before that, my grandmother accidentally took me to see a war movie called Zeppelin. We were the only two people in the darkened village hall, but still, the sight of burning airships dropping from the sky was quite the deal for a seven-year-old.
I thought of this experience while reading an article by Justine Bateman entitled Hollywood is dead. It’s a shame to announce this death, and her take is a little overly-nostalgic. I mean, Hollywood was always a ruthless money-making monster. All the same, her prognosis seems accurate enough.
But what killed it, I hear you ask. The author’s opinion is that ‘content’ killed Hollywood. And yes, I’ve been negative about ‘content’ myself. If we’re not making content what are we making?
According to Justine Bateman, not only has ‘content’ dominated Hollywod, now the production of ‘content’ is being automated by AI in a creative death-spiral. In short the movies are turning to slop and as a result, the AI Grim Reaper is now knocking on Hollywood’s door.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, she says. People are soon going to reject the AI ‘content’ slop bucket and look for something else: something that’s better because it’s more human. Bateman predicts:
“filmmakers will have to differentiate their work from that which AI can easily imitate. That means they will make unique, raw, and creatively daring work.”
Not only that, but audiences will rebel against AI in their wider lives and certainly reject it in the movies: “They will want something real, raw, and obviously human.”
If she’s right (and that’s a big ‘if’) this means that what we’re moving towards is something completely new and different. We’ve been wrong about AI. AI isn’t the start of a new era but rather the final scene of the old era. And it’s not only movies, there’s books and music too.
So what lies just beyond?
“the birth of the most incredible creative genres we’ve ever known. It will be new to us in the way jazz or rock and roll were new at the time, or French new wave films were back then. However, this will not be a return to anything from the past, but be something entirely new. Just The New.”
I’m mentioning all this because I think the argument also stands for writing generally.
I believe we’re on the cusp of a seismic change in the culture every bit as significant as the shift around 1910 when it was suddenly impossible to be a Victorian any more1. Just as no one can be Charles Dickens these days, very soon, no one will be able to market anything that looks like what AI could produce. Sure, we’ll make use of AI tools in the background, but readers, listeners and viewers won’t accept what AI offers unless it has first passed through the distinctively human creative imagination.
Ultimately this is just the iron hand of fashion. What looks cutting edge today will date very quickly, so that before long AI will be what you won’t be seen dead wearing.
Things are going to be very different. And I agree with Justine Bateman when I say: more than ever, embracing our humanity is the way forward.
Her three-word manifesto, “Just The New”, has clear echos of the poet Ezra Pound’s late-to-the-party summary of the modernist movement, “Make it new”. Ironically we’ve been here before, in 1928, nearly a century ago. But then Pound was hardly being original. He was paraphrasing an old Chinese text from the 12th century.
Novelty is like that: everything’s new, but it’s made from the old pieces we find lying around us.
What comes after content isn’t really new at all. It’s the oldest thing we know: our desire to connect with another person’s imagination. When we get tired of supposedly ‘perfect’ AI creations, we’ll go back to loving the beautiful mistakes that make human art special. And this will happen sooner than we may expect.
The future belongs to artists and writers who remember what makes us human - our messiness, our feelings, our strange ideas. In a world over-run by AI, being truly human might be a competitive advantage or it might not, but it’s what we’ve got.
References:
Michael North, 2013. Novelty. A History of the New. University of Chicago Press.
Stansky, Peter, 1997. On or about December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World. Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press.
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But you still just get a weekly email, sorry.
The Lost Medieval Library Found in a Romanian Church medievalists.net
Old news, but new to me. I’d love to find a lost medieval library in a tower somewhere, but I might be on the wrong continent for that kind of discovery.
HT: @glynmoody@mastodon.social
Image: Ropemaker’s Tower, Mediaș, Romania (Source. CCby SA4.0)
My notes were full but my heart was empty. Doug Toft travels beyond progressive summarization
Doug Toft explores his journey to making better notes on his reading. He found trying to summarize what he’d just read was heavy work. And Tiago Forte’s approach of ‘progressive summarization’ wasn’t really helping him.
Perhaps there’s a better way. He quotes Peter Elbow’s great book, Writing With Power. The author says:
“If you want to digest and remember what you are reading, try writing about it instead of taking notes… Perfectly organized notes that cover everything are beautiful, but they live on paper, not in your mind.”
Elsewhere (maybe I’ll find where) I’ve written about how a good way to summarize or paraphrase, to ‘write in your own words’, is to imagine discussing your reading with a friend. You might say: “I read this great book. It was all about…”.
We can easily do this kind of summary in everyday social life, so why not try it with our notes?
Image: Detail of a relief from Ostia showing writers at desks. (Source)
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Publishing slowly
I’m writing so slowly that you might be wondering if I’m ever going to get anything published.
Well wonder no more. I’m happy to say extracts of my memoir, ‘The Green Island Notebook’ are published in the anthology Destinations & Detours: New Australian Writing.
Published by Detour Editions, the collection launches here in Sydney on Sunday 2nd March 2025, and if you happen to be in the vicinity, I’d be delighted to meet you in person.
Book Launch 2pm, Sunday 2nd March, at Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick NSW
Watch out too for news of how you can get your hands on a copy, wherever in the world you find yourself.
And this isn’t the only news on the publishing front. I’ll be sharing details of some further publishing adventures very soon.
But don’t worry, whatever happens, I’ll still be writing slowly.
Randwick Literary Institute, the venue for our book launch, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025. Here it is in 1957, and it hasn’t changed much since then:
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To care is to disobey
Currently reading: Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano 📚
These days, being kind to the wrong people could land you in jail. What’s up with that?
I’ve written about how two-word phrases are a great way of getting your message across. Now here’s one that really intrigued me: Pirate Care.
That’s the title of a new book from Pluto Press, and as soon as you hear it you get an idea of what its about:
As politicians ramp up their twisted theatre of cruelty to grotesque levels, care from the bottom up is ever more urgent. Because those wrong people who don’t deserve to be cared for? Next year, or even next month, that’ll be you.
Read the book from Pluto Press, listen to an interview with the authors and commons activist David Bollier, and check out the syllabus and project that the book grew out of.
Or just put on your pirate hat and take action.
📖 Graziano, V., M. Mars and T. Medak. Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity. Vagabonds Series, v. 7. London: Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN: 9780745349800
Create a note system that indexes itself
While studying the cataloguing and indexing systems of the early Twentieth Century I noticed that the index box was originally supposed to be a key to the records held elsewhere. In other words it was like a library catalogue.
The library catalogue doesn’t exist for its own sake. Rather, it’s the key to finding something else - the books stored on the library shelves. From the late 19th Century onwards, any bureaucratic organisation typically stored its records in filing cabinets (Robertson, 2021), usually numbered consecutively (numerus currens) as they arrived or were created. Then alongside these records the index box contained a parallel catalogue entry for each item (Byles, 1911).
Without a comprehensive index, it would be very hard to find anything in the records. Sure, you could find something at random, provided you didn’t care what it was, but without the index, finding a specific item would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. If the records system used running numbers it would be easy to find the most recent documents, and the longest-held, since these would be located at the end and beginning of the records, respectively. But finding anything in between these points, without an index, would be extremely time-consuming.
As I read about this approach to record-keeping, I realised that Niklas Luhmann’s system of personal academic notes, his Zettelkasten, displayed some similar features to this, as well as some crucial differences.
Luhmann was a German sociologist who famously published a massive academic output by relying on his large collection of handwritten notes, his Zettelkasten (note-box). His Zettelkasten was similar to the standard filing system in that it was a box of numbered index cards. But it differed in two important places.
First, on the whole, there were no other records. The index box simply referred to itself. The records and the index of the records were the same thing. (There were of course references to external academic sources, but I mean that Luhmann’s Zettelkasten didn’t refer to a separate location where he kept his notes such as a set of notebooks or another separate filing cabinet; rather, his notes were the records, and his records were the notes.)
Secondly, the numbering system wasn’t exactly consecutive (numerus currens), it was instead associative. In other words, the notes weren’t placed strictly in order of writing, but were arranged instead according to how their contents related to other notes. He started consecutively but then branched off by adding letters and numbers to the notation. For example, he would add a note that related to note 9 by creating note 9a, and so on (this is a slight simplification, but basically sound).
These two features, (‘records=index=records’ and ‘associative-not-consecutive-numbering’) taken together, meant that Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was effectively almost self-indexing. It was an index of itself, and there was hardly any other indexing work, other than adding cards in relevant locations, with a suitable ID number.
True, Luhmann’s second Zettelkasten did also have a keyword index, but this index of 3,200 keywords was quite limited relative to the large number of notes (67,000) it supposedly indexed. And this index didn’t reference every instance of his keywords. On the contrary, it didn’t need to be exhaustive because by means of their ID numbers the notes were arranged in long chains so Luhmann could jump from one relevant note to another, without needing to keep referring back to an index.
According to Luhmann scholar Johannes Schmidt (2018: 58):
“the file’s keyword index makes no claim to providing a complete list of all cards in the collection that refer to a specific term. Rather, Luhmann typically listed only one to four places where the term could be found in the file, the idea being that all other relevant entries in the collection could be quickly identified via the internal system of references described above.”
I really like the idea of a self-indexing system, and it somehow felt familiar, but I couldn’t think where I’d heard of this idea before.
Then I realised it’s been staring me in the face this whole time. One of my chief long-term inspirations is Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977), which was also a key influence for Ward Cunningham, creator of the first ever wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository.
A Pattern Language has enjoyed a cult following and has been identified as “one of the most widely read architectural treatises ever published” (Dawes and Ostwald, 2020), though not without criticism (Dawes and Ostwald, 2017). Anyway, here’s what the preface of that book said about the concept of a pattern language:
“A pattern language has the structure of a network. […] The sequence of patterns is both a summary of the language, and at the same time, an index to the patterns.” — ‘Summary of the language’ p. xviii https://patternlanguage.cc/
It’s interesting to compare and contrast these two examples of a pre-Web, analogue hypertext. Both demonstrate significant elements of this self-indexing aspect. What Christopher Alexander said about his pattern language can also be seen in Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. The sequence, whether of patterns or of notes, is both a summary and at the same time an index of itself.
What I take from all this is the reminder that I don’t need to work too hard at indexing, provided my notes include a few links to other relevant notes.
If every note had just one link, then all the notes would be connected. In contrast, though, a note with no links (an ‘orphan’), will be very hard to find again, except via a full-text search. So I need just enough indexing to be useful, and no more. As Luhmann himself said:
“The decision where to place what in the file can involve a great deal of randomness as long as I add references linking the other options” (Luhmann, 1987, p. 143, quoted in Schmidt, 58)
Well, now it’s time for a confession: my own collection of notes has no keyword index at all.
But I wonder how much of a keyword index would be useful for my own collection of notes. My feeling is that there’s little point in creating a separate keyword index for two main reasons, as folllows.
First, In the digital age we have at our fingertips something Luhmann never had: a full-text search capability. This means that any time I want to find all my notes containing a particular word, I can easily find them almost instantly. No need for an index just to find notes.
Second, it’s useful and efficient to do all my work on my notes in my notes. This means documenting my searches. Let’s say I want to find all my notes relating to a particular word, as in the case above. Rather than just doing the search, I also document it by creating a new note, perhaps named after the keyword I’m searching. The point is that there was a reason I wanted to do this particular search, and If I don’t document it, that particular information is forever lost. In contrast, by documenting my search I create a new note which may prove useful in future and which also acts as a kind of hub for future searches relating to this particular keyword.
This is similar, at least in spirit, to Luhmann’s ‘hub notes’ which Schmidt identifies:
“The cards containing a collection of references are furthermore of interest because they represent so-called “hubs”, i.e., cards that function as nodes that feature an above-average number of links to other cards so that these few cards provide access points to extensive parts of the file.” (Schmidt, 58)
There’s a brief but useful section on hub notes in Chapter 6 of Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing, which clearly shows how these differ from structure notes. I found this distinction subtle but helpful.
Since I haven’t even got one, I’m not sure about giving advice on indexing, but if I was sure, I’d say this:
Make a keyword index if it pleases you to do so, especially where the keyword doesn’t otherwise appear in your note. But observe over time how much use you gain from your index. The concepts of ‘self-indexing records’ and ‘working on your notes in your notes’ may provide new insights into the value of your index-work.
References
Alexander, Christopher. A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. Oxford university press, 2018.
Byles, R.B. 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts. London, Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd.
Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “The mathematical structure of Alexander’s A Pattern Language: An analysis of the role of invariant patterns.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 47, no. 1 (2020): 7-24.
Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: analysing, mapping and classifying the critical response.” City, Territory and Architecture 4, no. 1 (2017): 17.
Doto, Bob. A System for Writing. New Old Traditions, 2024.
Luhmann, N. Biographie, Attitüden, Zettelkasten. In N. Luhmann, Archimedes und wir. Interviews, edited by D. Baecker & G. Stanitzek (pp. 125–155). Berlin: Merve, 1987.
Robertson, Craig. The filing cabinet: A vertical history of information. U of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Schmidt, Johannes FK. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12, no. 1 (2018). Reprinted as Ch 10 in Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft, pp. 101-115. Columbia University Press, 2024.
Stay in the Writing Slowly loop and never miss a thing (unless I forgot to press ‘publish’, in which case, yeah, you might miss a thing). Anyway:
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.
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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?