I wanted to learn how to take notes, so I read eight books about it: Building a Second Brain, The Giant’s Notebook, How to Take Smart Notes, The Power of the Note-Taking Habit, The Note-Taking Reading Method, Rediscovering the Memo, Lee Dong-jin’s Reading Method, and The One Thing.
Five of those eight have never been published in English. Those titles, and every quotation below, are my own translations from the Korean — there is a note on sources at the end.
Let me give away the ending: all eight were saying the same thing.
One of them I closed thinking “well, that was all rather obvious” — and then went back through my underlines and realized I had simply reviewed the previous book from a different angle.
The One Sentence — Don’t Copy It Down, Put It in Your Own Words
Four authors arrive at the same place by four different roads.
Kim Ik-han, The Giant’s Notebook — make it yours Filter everything through your own interests, then compress only what resonated into your own language. “Only what you engaged with is knowledge.”
Shin Jeong-cheol, The Power of the Note-Taking Habit — memo reading Beneath each passage you copy out, write your own reaction in a different color pen. The purpose is not to store the important parts; it is to record your response to what the author said.
Takashi Saito, Rediscovering the Memo — write as though you’ll have to explain it “You have to write with the intention of telling someone about it later” (p. 15). A note is not storage. It is compression into a form you can explain to another person.
Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes — in your own words “If you truly want to make something your own, you have to translate it into your own words” (p. 42).
Different vocabulary, identical prescription.
What you copied is not knowledge.
That four authors arrive at the same principle by different routes is itself evidence for the principle.
Except One Book Attaches a Condition
Of the eight, only Shin Jeong-cheol’s The Note-Taking Reading Method puts the brakes on that conclusion.
If you write down only what you understood instead of the author’s actual sentence, then in the cases where you misunderstood the author, no occasion ever arrives to correct it. (p. 90)
Write only in your own words and your misreadings become permanent. You go on misunderstanding the author for the rest of your life.
So the book asks for one thing more: keep the original passage as well — but set apart from your own thinking. If you don’t separate the two, you will later have no way of telling which was yours and which was the book’s (p. 91).
Which means the conclusion wants a small correction. Not don’t copy it down, but —
The original and your reaction, side by side, never mixed.
The book adds a word on transcription while it’s there: copying passages out mindlessly does nothing for you, and you have to observe the words and sentences deliberately as you go (p. 92). I read that as saying transcription is work done by the eyes, not the hand.
If It Still Won’t Come, You Have No Question
You may read this far, agree that you ought to write in your own words, open your notebook, and stop dead. I did.
The Note-Taking Reading Method has a line about how “once you begin keeping a reading journal, remarkably more thoughts occur to you than when simply reading” (p. 96). In the margin beside it I wrote:
“Not to me, they don’t.”
The cause turned out to be further back in the same book.
A sense of a problem is what matters for thoughts to occur. If there is no question in your head, thoughts do not come readily, however much you read. Thoughts come when there is a problem you want to solve. (p. 245)
Not stupidity. The absence of a question. Read without one and the sentences simply file past — nothing to argue with, nothing to agree with, and therefore nothing to write.
Questions to Carry In (pp. 56–58)
Toward the author
- Why did the author write this book?
- What is the central claim the author wants to convey?
- What is the evidence for that claim?
- Is what the author says true?
Toward yourself
- What here addresses a problem I actually have?
- Is there anything connected to my own interests?
- Is there anything that differs from my thinking and makes me uncomfortable?
- Is there anything here that would help change how I live?
Carry these in and the passages worth underlining select themselves. Underlining is, after all, the work of choosing the sentences you need — and a question is what does the choosing.
If You Don’t Understand It, Read It Again
Sometimes you carry a question in and still can’t put the thing in your own words. That is a different problem. You haven’t understood it yet.
For a long time I assumed this meant I had no thoughts of my own, or lacked the background for them. It didn’t. I simply didn’t know the material well enough. Try to restate something in your own words and every hole in your understanding presents itself for inspection.
The remedy is to read it again. Reading a book you didn’t understand two or three times is a perfectly good use of an evening. Lee Dong-jin, a Korean film critic known as much for how much he reads as for what he reviews, says you only need to reread the parts you underlined.
There is an order to it, though.
Read until you understand it → then put it in your own words.
Transcribing something you haven’t understood is what’s pointless. Rereading is not.
And once you do understand it, Tiago Forte’s progressive summarization earns its keep. Don’t attempt it in one pass: bold, then highlight, then a keyword summary, keeping ten or twenty percent each time and shaving the rest away. He calls this not a method for remembering more but a method for forgetting more. The merely decent parts have to go before the excellent ones can be seen.
What One Book Did to My Notes
These are the reactions I left while reading How to Take Smart Notes, in the order I wrote them.
At the start “Reading this and finding that I have no thoughts. I’m only re-thinking what I read. No thoughts, so nothing to write.”
A few days later “I couldn’t put it in my own words because I hadn’t understood it.”
Later on “I had no thoughts back then, but today I seem to have a few. Nothing grand — the sort of agreement you’d leave in a comment, or a ‘where have I read this before.'”
On finishing “Rereading the notes, I thought: through all that confusion, I did pull out the parts I needed.”
An embarrassing record, which is precisely why I left it as it stands. The point is this — none of it happened because I reread the book. It happened because I kept writing down my reactions.
The principle proved itself inside my own notebook.
In Short
You don’t have to read all eight. What remains is this.
- Carry one question in. No question, no thoughts.
- Original and reaction side by side, kept separate. Write only in your own words and your own misreadings never get caught.
- If it won’t come, you haven’t understood it yet. Read it again.
Better one question and one paragraph than a finished book and not a line written. That is where I started too.
A Note on Sources
Three of the eight books are available in English and are cited by their published titles: Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain; Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes; Gary Keller, The One Thing.
The other five I read in Korean, and as far as I know none has an English edition. The English titles above are my own renderings rather than official ones, and every quotation from them is my own translation. Page numbers refer to the Korean editions, so they won’t help you much unless you read Korean — I’ve kept them anyway, because a quotation without a location is just a claim.
- Kim Ik-han, 『거인의 노트』 — The Giant’s Notebook
- Shin Jeong-cheol, 『메모 습관의 힘』 — The Power of the Note-Taking Habit
- Shin Jeong-cheol, 『메모 독서법』 — The Note-Taking Reading Method
- Takashi Saito, 『메모의 재발견』 — Rediscovering the Memo (a Japanese book, read in Korean translation)
- Lee Dong-jin, 『이동진 독서법』 — Lee Dong-jin’s Reading Method