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Physicist Richard Feynman invited a historian to his office for an interview. When the interviewee saw Feynman's notebooks, he explained his fascination with "this incredible record of Feynman's thinking." No, no," Feynman protested, "they are not a record of the thinking process. The notebooks are MY thought process.
The next question has been on our minds for quite a while: Is it useful to read books and non-fiction texts (essays, scientific articles, etc.) without having pen and paper (or the computer and a note-taking program) next to you?
Sönke Ahrens, in his book How to Take Smart Notes, talks about how writing at school or university (exams, papers, homework) is seen as a task with a beginning and an end. There are thousands of study techniques on how to write summaries and outlines to study for an exam, and thousands more with guides on how to write a paper or thesis, with guidelines and steps to follow. The goal of studying according to these guides is to prepare students for critical thinking and research. But Sönke refutes this premise, because in his approach study, when done well, is actually research, because it is about gaining a perspective that cannot be anticipated and that is shared publicly with the scientific community.
Private knowledge does not exist in academia. An idea that you keep to yourself is just as good as an idea you never had. And a knowledge that no one can reproduce is not a knowledge. Publishing something always means writing it down so that someone can read it. The history of unwritten ideas does not exist as such.
For this reason, the presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the same coin. If writing is the medium in which research is done, and study is nothing other than research, then there is no reason not to consider writing as the main pillar of one's work.
Focusing on writing doesn't mean you have to give up other tasks like reading, absorbing information in lectures, classes, courses, and talking to your professor and fellow students, but it will make you do all those other things differently. If you have a clear and tangible goal in mind when you attend a class, discussion, or workshop, you will be more engaged and even more focused on learning, rather than trying to figure out what you should be learning. You will be looking for the point at which the questions emerge whose answers are worth writing about.
So the question is whether it makes sense to export the underlined of the book, what has just been finished. In this way, some sentences and passages are taken out of context that seemed interesting while reading. Now, days, weeks or even months later, it is difficult to remember why these ideas were considered worth remembering.
"One cannot think without writing" – Niklas Luhmann
Reading without writing doesn't take us to the same places as reading through writing. However, as Andy Matuschak says, you have to be careful not to get lost in the thousand ways of taking notes. They are shiny objects that look much better than the ones we use. Note-taking (or underlining or summarizing) is the visible component of an invisible practice (thinking, brainstorming, studying, learning): If you see someone who usually has good ideas and is considered "smart" taking notes in their notebook in a seemingly very intellectual way, you might imagine that if you get the same notebook and organize your notes like that person, you too will become "intellectual." Taking notes, storing information, sorting files: It's easy to fall into this trap because it looks like you're doing something, even if that something isn't very useful.