How To Take Smart Notes: 8 Steps to taking smart notes.

Literature Notes are meant to be incorporated in one’s own writing.

Guidelines in creating literature notes:

• Be extremely selective in what you decide to keep
• Keep the overall note as short as possible
• Use your own words, instead of copying quotes verbatim
• Write down the bibliographic details on the source

These notes are based on reviewing the fleeting notes and literature notes and relates to your current work on or interests. The purpose is not just to collect ideas, but to develop arguments and discussions over time.

Questions to ask yourself to create them: 

• How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know?
• How can I combine ideas to generate something new?
• What questions are triggered by these new ideas?

Once done, throw away the fleeting notes from step one and file the literature notes from step two into your bibliographic slip-box.

Add the permanent notes you’ve created to your slip-box. Do this by filing each note behind a related note (if it doesn’t relate to any existing notes, add it to the very end).

With so many standardized notes organized in a consistent format, you are now free to develop ideas in a “bottom up” way. See what is there, what is missing, and which questions arise. Look for gaps that you can fill through further reading.

Instead of coming up with a topic upfront, you can just look into your slip-box and look for what is most interesting. Your writing will be based on what you already have, not on an unfounded guess about what the literature you are about to read might contain. Follow the connections between notes and collect all the relevant notes on the topic you’ve found.

Instead of copying your notes into a manuscript, translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument. As you detect holes in your argument, fill them or change the argument.

From this point forward, all you have to do is refine your rough draft until it’s ready to be published.