Smart notes for graduate students
How I transformed my academic writing with the Zettelkasten method
As a graduate student working with an absurdly large amount of source material, my notes became unmanageable as they grew. My system was to create searchable notes in Evernote with quotations and a short abstract for each source, which was great when I knew what I was looking for. More often, they languished in notebooks that I forgot about. Luckily, I found Sönke Ahrens’ wonderful book, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking — for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers, and my writing has become radically more efficient since I implemented his model. It provides a proven method for enhancing the research process and making it much easier to produce academic writing at all levels: articles, theses, dissertations, teaching materials, and conference presentations.
The Zettelkasten method
The technique is simple. Instead of organizing notes into pre-defined categories, you put them all in the same place (a slip-box or “Zettelkasten”) and connect them with ideas and concepts. This is easy to do through apps like Roam Research or Obsidian (I use Obsidian), which allow you to make bidirectional links and automatically generate mind maps from them. As you work, you will find that clusters form around the ideas that stimulate you the most, and you can explore those connections (and mind the gaps!) to generate new ideas and content. Scale is not longer a problem but an advantage, and the more interconnected your notes are, the easier it is to find unexpected pathways through them and stumble upon new ideas. As you take notes, putting things into your own words — both in the notes for source materials and notes on your own thinking — means that you will never sit down to write with a blank page. Instead, you will have many bits of content that you have already written and only need to connect, develop, and edit.
Ahrens lays out how to do this in detail, and you can find many articles and videos explaining the method. The philosophy behind it is that we need a reliable and consistent tool to deal with information and free up our brains to do the real work — coming up with ideas and communicating them to others. Instead of relying on your memory to handle the constellation of sources and concepts that relate to your research topic, you set up a system that maps the connections and allows you to stumble upon related notes. Your research process begins to look more like a late-night Wikipedia binge as you excitedly jump from link to link, forming new connections that emerge from your own interconnected notes.
Making it my own
Part of the beauty of the Zettelkasten method is its simplicity, and this makes it flexible for different workflows. I have made one adjustment to this method based on my personal research needs: I include extensive extracts in each source note. Ahrens and others warn against this, and rightly so, as it can become a way of putting off the real work of engaging with the material. Writing your own abstracts and ideas for each source is an important part of checking that you understood it and generating new content. However, I do both, and here’s how and why:
- I use extracts and writing in my own words in completely different ways, but I always prioritize notes that are in my own words. Following the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself), I created templates in Obsidian so that I have a form to fill out for each source. I structure my source notes so that I begin with an abstract that summarizes the main points, evidence, methods, and conclusions in my own words. This is a factual abstract, not a critical one. I follow it with a section on “Notes and Ideas.” This is the vital section for generating my own thoughts based on the questions and ideas I pulled from the text. Here I put the work into context, noting interesting convergences and connections between it and other works/ideas, which gives me the opportunity to create relevant backlinks even if they are not exactly in line with the text itself. I note the questions that came up when I was reading and ideas for further development of the themes or conclusions. This section links the text with others in a way that leads to future permanent notes on my own concepts and ideas.
- When I read a text, I don’t know what will be relevant for me in the future. Because of this, I may not focus on important points in my notes or may only mention them briefly. However, if I import highlighted portions that seem interesting and important (but not sufficiently relevant to my current thoughts to become part of the Notes and Ideas section), those excerpts are in the source notes and are searchable. In the future, when I start to explore a topic related to that source, I am more likely to stumble upon the connection if I included abundant excerpts.
- By including excerpts, I allow myself to draw more interesting connections when I revisit the text while writing. I may look at my notes to understand the broad approach to a topic in the text, but then I can easily reference the excerpts below it to see the context or examples related to that topic. These will often point to aspects of ideas that I had not previously understood even as I explored other aspects of the same ideas.
Technological advances make excerpts easy
Recent technology has dramatically enhanced our ability to extract highlights and annotations from PDFs and organize them effectively in our notes. I use Zotero and Zotfile to extract notes from PDFs and mdnotes to convert them to markdown for Obsidian. It’s a quick and simple workflow to carry out a process that took me hours just a couple of years ago.
I think that this is part of why we have been shy in the past about excerpting too much — it was a lot of work to pull all of that text into a new document. Also, it can easily become too much material to process if we are relying on rereading or even skimming it every time we need to engage with it. However, it is completely practical to add these excerpts to the bottom of a source note where they can be safely ignored until they are needed. Ignoring them is key — they should never be a substitute for notes in your own words that summarize and engage with the text through critical assessment and your own ideas.
Consider sources twice — but only the important ones
It can be useful to consider each important text twice, and extracted highlights and annotations can help you do this. This can be time-consuming, so I would not recommend it for every text you read, but I have found that it yields different types of information from writing notes immediately after reading. Part of this is because when you rely on your highlights later, you also have a chance to note and assess your own thinking as a reader: Why did you choose these particular passages? Based on their length and frequency, you may see that certain ideas seemed to excite you more than you realized.
You also come to the work with fresh eyes but in a way that is less overwhelming, since you only need to read highlights and not the full text. I find that I draw different connections when I use this method because I have already taken time to read and absorb the whole text. This feels like a second interview where you get to ask follow-up questions on familiar topics and the rapport is already good.
Resources for smart notetaking
If you think that this might be helpful for your writing (and I think that this method is flexible enough to work for nearly anyone!), I recommend picking up the book and checking out the website for How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking — for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. There are lots of articles that give the main points, but the book is definitely worth your time.
If you want personalized help with academic writing, feel free to contact me. The other resources I mentioned above — Zotero, Zotfile, mdnotes, and Obsidian — are all free, so go get ’em, you hungry grad students!
