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Rewriting Notes Is Thinking Work, Not Maintenance • Zettelkasten Method

SystemSystem
edited January 22 in Project: Zettelkasten.de
Rewriting Notes Is Thinking Work, Not Maintenance • Zettelkasten Method

Rewriting notes isn’t wasted effort or a mere maintenance task. It is itself part of writing-to-think, with the goal to improve clarity of thought. Separate this from writing-to-communicate to avoid self-censorship. These are different mental modes.

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Comments

  • zosimawormphdzosimawormphd

    What a timely post as I have just reworked my source intake to final paper method within the last 24 hours.

    For the last 9 months or so, I've been using my ZK to help me write papers for my master's program. It's a correspondence program: no professor, no class discussions; all books, all papers. (MA in NT Studies at Global University (Springfield, MO, USA)) I was having a hard time forming a coherent outline of my literature notes/zettles and spending a lot of time breaking down and rewriting the concepts when I sat down to flesh my outline into a paper.

    Here is my new method I am trying while trying to finish the last 7k words of my paper.

    1. Create interlinked literature notes from the source material (non-atomized)
    2. Create hub notes for the specific themes or questions of the essay prompt
    3. Atomize notes and make connections between lit notes, forming proper zettles along the general contours of the essay themes
    4. Organize the hubs into subhubs and make further connections and new zettles
    5. Discern an argument in the subhubs; outline accordingly.
    6. Write paper

    If I am understanding correctly, I think @Sascha's post would recommend atomizing the literature notes in between steps 1 and 2 and only including the resulting zettles (not the lit notes) in my ZK. I choose not to because (1) time--I enjoy knowledge work and my topics, but I will get lost in the weeds and never write my paper without the essay hubs to serve as barriers; (2) the revisitability of lit. notes--by leaving the lit notes as semi-processed, I can go back and reprocess them in a different way if I desire once I am older and wiser.

  • SaschaSascha

    If I am understanding correctly, I think @Sascha's post would recommend atomizing the literature notes in between steps 1 and 2 and only including the resulting zettles (not the lit notes) in my ZK.

    My recommendation would be to eliminate intermediary steps and go straight from highlighted sources to Zettelkasten notes. :)

    It seem to me that you adopted a more malleable approach. It might be that in practice the difference between what I do in practice and what you are doing is less pronounced.

    As you can see in this video: https://zettelkasten.de/atomicity/guide/#demonstrations-on-atomic-note-taking

    Atomicity is more like a guiding principle. I move in and out of atomicity while I am writing in my Zettelkasten.

    I am a Zettler

  • zosimawormphdzosimawormphd

    Having just completed outlining and linking all my zettles for my upcoming paper, I’m realizing now that my process is not dissimilar from your “pre-processing.” Some of my literature notes are small and atomic right off the bat, but lots of my other literature notes are effectively just the first stage of me processing to atomicity

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