Every week, I put out a newsletter called "Learned." In it, I discuss what I'm learning and how I'm going about doing so. This week's issue is about learning how to take better notes. Here is an excerpt:

What We’re Learning:

Taking notes is hard. Let me restate that: Taking effective, useful notes is hard. When I was in high school, my history teacher, Mr. Garland (who was, hands down, one of my favorite teachers) gave us notes to copy in class. He would lecture about the topic of the day while we busily copied the outline from the transparency to our notebooks. It was time-consuming, hard, and (sorry, Mr. G) not the best way of taking notes.

Back in high school, when I was struggling to take effective notes, I was told to make up symbols or abbreviations like using “w/“ and “w/o” for “with” and “without” respectively. And then I got pointed towards shorthand, which I found interesting, almost like a form of code.

But true shorthand, like the Pitman or Gregg methods, is an alternate form of writing - it uses different shapes for the letters of the alphabet with their own rules form combining letters, abbreviating words, and omitting punctuation - and it requires study and dedication.

And, as a high school student, I could barely be bothered to take notes, much less learn an alternative method of writing to do so.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so. I suppose I could learn a form of shorthand, but...why? I do everything on the computer these days, mainly because I can type faster than I can write (even with shortcuts) and once written, typed text is much, much easier to read than my penmanship.

Exhibit A for the Defense: My recent hand-written notes on John Anderson’s Active Control of Thought model for a class I’m taking. If you can figure out what my notes say, do me a favor and let me know?

I realized that I already had the perfect note-taking tool system in the form of a mark-up language* called Markdown.

I love Markdown. It’s basically a system of formatting a document while you type that is baked into a lot of writing and note-taking apps. Apps I already have and use every day like Bear and Day One, and websites like Steemit. In other words, it’s very, very easy to create lists, line breaks, lengthy quotes, and hyperlinks with only a few keystrokes while typing my notes as I normally would.

Instead of having to go back and re-write my notes from shorthand into normal text, or instead of having to try to decipher my own hand-writing, I have a system where I can format on the fly, as I’m writing down new information.

But, I only knew the basics. As I said, I use Bear and Day One a lot. Bear is where all my notes go and a lot of my rough-drafting is done. And Day One is where I keep my private journals, records, and everything else. Both use Markdown to provide neatly-formatted, easily-read entries, and I wasn’t using the tech in either app enough to be able to take notes in real time.

Not to mention that there are some things Markdown just doesn’t do. It’s not a form of shorthand, after all, so there is no capacity for abbreviating words or otherwise compressing lengthy pieces of information into smaller chunks. For that, I would have to delve into the world of macros and text-expanders, but that’s a different article.

I decided that I would need to suss out my other favorite form of notes - the cheat sheet - to make sure I had all the bells and whistles locked down. I found a couple of good ones, like this one on GitHub and this one from Wikipedia. Which means I can now get started on the project I’ve been avoiding all afternoon: watching a video lecture and taking some notes.

Markdown:

• John Gruber’s (the creator) documentation and explanation
• CodeAcademy’s course on mastering Markdown
• Matt Cone’s Markdown guide
• ReadWrite.com’s 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown

Shorthand:

• How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen

How do you take notes? Do you prefer paper and pen or a laptop and mouse? Do you record your notes? Publish them? Write them up and then never look at them again? Got any advice? Let me know! Also, if you liked this excerpt, you can read the full post for free at Learned

Thanks for reading!