How to take Book Notes

 This was a comment on a podcast Tim Ferris How to Remember what you read

Veronica Shi

1 year ago (edited)

I recently discovered and finished reading a book called <How to Take Smart Notes> by Sonke Ahrens. The book details a method of reading/taking notes with the ultimate goal to write (e.g. academic paper, book, etc) called "The Slip-Box Method", which is originally developed by the prolific sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Rather than just highlighting sentences or making comments on the margin, the method advocates first rephrasing (important: not just copying verbatim) what you wanted to highlight to an index card - this will comprise the so-called "Literature Notes". If you take these "literature notes" diligently and consistently as you read different literature, you will gradually accumulate quite a number of them. What you then want to do is to review those notes periodically to "draw connections" among those notes and write your thoughts/interpretation on a new index card - this will become part of your "Permanent Notes". These "permanents notes" are your best friends when it comes to writing your own work, because those are your already externalized thoughts you can analyze, compare, and assemble easily rather than starting from a blank page and trying to retrieve everything from your brain. I'm only a few weeks into implementing the Slip-box Method while reading, so it's still early for me to say if the method works wonder. That said, I could really feel that the act of rephrasing and writing down what I read on an index card activates the brain way much more than simply highlighting sentences (which is quite passive) as I read.