I've been interested in note taking for years. I have no concrete method but have some good ideas about it.

The actual underlining, highlighting, special symbols etc. is unimportant. All of value of the note is in 1. That the note appears in and only in relevant situation and 2. The appearance of this note gives you an idea you care about. This means most peoples note taking systems are useless because they all go in a hierarchy of folders you have to search by text. In other words you first have to know that it's relevant to your current use case before you even realize you need to go find it. This means a note cannot give you a new idea, a new intellectual connection, but only fill in a fact for something you know exists but the exact value is on the tip of your tongue. The opposite of this for example is when you're talking to someone and he says "Hey you know XXX said something similar and his idea was this..." This means that the organization of your notes matters a lot. If you have to "find" a note you've already lost. You want to be able to "discover" notes. How they're organized is going to determine how you can discover them, how you can travel from current situation to relevant notes while not knowing if a target note even exists.

Also you need to distinguish between a verbatim re-recording of the original information and a transformation of that information (e.g. a summary, a paraphrase in the terms of a different framework, a paraphrase at a lower or higher level of analysis, etc). Re-recording is useless. Transformations are what's useful. The job of a transformation is to reduce the gap of the future mental leap you need to make when you're in the use case situation and have to realize there's an important connection between the current situation and your note. You don't know what future use case situations there are, and that's the problem. So you can only write transformations speculatively, aiming to stay in the general zone where future connections are most likely to occur.

>>24941687
I just underline and write in the margins if the book is mine, or write in a notebook or vimwiki file. I don't think notes should be much more complex than this, but to each its own.

i dont take notes, i write in a manner somewhat like zizek has described, perpetually avoiding the task of writing the book, fighting the big war, by dodging about writing little essays and theses here and there, fighting and fleeing border skirmishes, like a guerilla force on the run. the statecraft of an organized notekeeping system to me assumes clearance of a fog of war that can't be lifted until the end. one makes to navigate court like a Count when one should be armed up like a Marquis. with intellectual work you're always on the borderlines of comprehension and facticity, you're always ignorantly groping forward through small acts of apprehension until like lightning it all snaps together and the fragments are reorganized into a table of contents. the war metaphor is dispensed with at exactly this moment that it is no longer needed and we can begin again the peacetime labors of bibliographic organization, embellishment by footnote, and any other such "belle lettres" that strike my fancy.