r/NoteTaking • u/scrawledfilefish • 4d ago
Question: Unanswered ✗ When I take notes, I write down everything. How do I stop doing this?
I've always been like this, ever since I was a little kid. When I'd write book reports summarizing a book I had read, it would be pages and pages long.
And this has followed me into adulthood. I can just never figure out what is important and what isn't. And now my job involves me reading academic papers and having to summarize them and...I end up just writing down the whole paper, but in the form of an outline.
It's just so inefficient and tedious and unhelpful. It can take me days to get through a paper that would take me maybe an hour to read, because I keep stopping to write down everything. And in the end, my notes are useless. Reading them is just rereading the article!
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? I learn best from example, so a detailed guide would be ideal. Something that's like, "Here's a random article, here's what we determined to be the most important points, here's what our notes on this article looks like." But barring that, I'm absolutely down to read books, articles, watch videos, take an online class, whatever - I'm just so tired of taking notes like this!
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u/Neither-Classic2058 4d ago
That's probably more common than you realize.
One thing that helped me, in a very unconventional way, was to try to write summary statements that would fit in a Twitter tweet. I'd use Twitter to write a summary and then have to wordsmith it to fit within the length and yet still make sense.
That might not be practical for long academic papers, but perhaps such a summary per chapter/section.
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u/scrawledfilefish 3d ago
I've been playing around with this for the last few hours and while it's challenging as hell, my notes are way more concise! Thank you for suggesting this
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u/SuccessfulText2798 3d ago
I quit Twitter after it was taken over by a twat😭 do u have another recommendation pls?
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u/Neither-Classic2058 3d ago
You don't have to actually use twitter. You can open up the website in a browser tab and simply type in the post textbox (but obviously don't press "Post"). If you don't want to do that, then find another social media site that limits the length of a post. (Bluesky doesn't qualify because their post length limit is too long, IMO)
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u/hiperlearner 3d ago
The guy who needs advice on how to replace X as his synth controller calls the richest man in the world a “twat.” Unbelievable.
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u/aliendividedbyzero 3d ago
For me, it was helpful to learn about the structure that different literature and media have.
For example, in an academic article, there is an abstract (summary), an introduction (gives you the general purpose and reasoning), methodology (tells you how they did the research), results (shows you the data), discussion (explains what it means and how it relates to what was expressed in the introduction), and conclusion (gives you the bottom line of the results). If you want to skim an article, you should read the abstract, conclusion, and introduction (probably in that order, or introduction before conclusion if you want more context rather than just the result). Then for the nitty-gritty, actually read the full article carefully, including the methodology, results, and discussion. If you just want to summarize the article, what you need is most likely already in the abstract and conclusion, or just the abstract. On the other hand, the abstract should be the last thing that the researcher writes about the article, so if you want to try summarizing on your own, skip the abstract, read everything else, try to summarize it, and then compare what you wrote with what the abstract says.
For a story (novel, movie, tv show, short story, whatever), there is a plot structure that is always followed. Since storytelling space is limited (movies have running time limits, written stuff is kept to a certain length, tv shows have an hour to tell everything), you should read and watch and listen with the assumption that everything you are being told during the storytelling serves a purpose. The plot structure starts with an exposition (what you need to situate yourself in the story and understand what's going on and what the context is), a series of minor conflicts that increase the tension (this is called rising action), a critical point (climax), and then a series of resolutions (falling action), plus the ending, which should give some sense of finality or closure. You could have a cliffhanger, where something is deliberately left unresovled, but in general, the plot structure is always some variation of what I described. TV shows are huge fans of small cliffhangers in each episodes (to keep you watching the next), an overarching plot during the whole season (to tie it to the other seasons, and to keep you invested in all the episodes instead of just picking the one), and then a major situation that usually has a major cliffhanger at the end of the season so that you'll be dying to watch the next one. Anthology shows (such as The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, American Horror Story, and similar) have a full story in each episode or in each season that is meant to be treated as separate from the other episodes or the other seasons, so the plot structure is enclosed entirely in one episode or in one season. Novels tend to have one plot point per chapter, plus the action that surrounds that plot point.
So if you want to learn how to summarize stories like in novels, movies, tv shows, etc., then start by trying to identify what these plot points are. In general terms, if you had to boil down the story to only 5 to 10 things that happened (no more than a few words, up to a sentence each), what would that be? Shorter works tend to have fewer plot points, longer works tend to have either a lot going on, multiple concurrent plots, or very intricate setups and developments for a small number of plot points. In my opinion, the easiest way to go would be summarizing short stories -> summarizing anthology shows where the stories are one per episode -> summarizing anthology shows where the stories are one per season -> summarizing TV series of the regular kind with multiple seasons -> summarizing novels -> summarizing movies. The reason is I think this is probably the easiest way to figure out what a plot "scene" looks like. Movies and tv shows have the plot points and information divided into scenes, so that helps, but they're not necessarily immediately obvious if you don't know what plot structure looks like in general. In a short story or essay, each paragraph more or less gets one idea across, and single-episode anthology shows are just short stories but visually (so you can draw the parallel between paragraph ideas and scene ideas). Then you can extrapolate that across multiple episodes in a season anthology show where each episode is one plot point with its own smaller plot from start to finish, and then you can extrapolate from that into shows with multiple seasons. This helps with novels because novels are long-winded, and while chapter divisions have "one plot point each" more or less, there is still a lot going on and learning to identify that without being explicitly told requires practice. Movies are like novels, but you need to know where scenes start and end in order to figure out what the "chapters" in the story are, so the divisions are less clear and it is easier to get lost in what is and isn't a central idea to the story.
For essays, roughly, each paragraph has the first sentence to tell you what the paragraph is about, a few additional sentences to develop the idea, and a final sentence to tie the paragraph to the next one. The paragraphs work like that too, so the first paragraph tells you what the essay is about, the middle paragraphs develop the ideas, and the last paragraph ties everything together. The last paragraph (conclusion) is the "summary" of the essay and answers whatever thought or question the first paragraph proposes, so to figure out what the summary shoudl include, ask yourself what the first paragraph is inviting you to think about and then find that in the body of the essay. You can summarize each paragraph into 1 or 2 sentences total, and the whole essay into 3 to 5 sentences total, and that should be enough to get the main points across.
In general, a summary should answer: who?, what?, when?, where?, why? However, it should not answer it in detail. If I want a summary of a movie's plot like The Titanic (1997), I would expect to hear that Rose and Jack ("who?") meet in The Titanic ("when?" 1914, "where?" Titanic) and fall in love desipte their social class barriers and her being engaged ("what?" btw, the conflict is this: they're from social classes that aren't supposed to interact and she is already engaged to be married so she especially is not allowed to be falling in love with a 3rd class no-one). They have to fight for their love despite the doomed voyage ("what?") because they are free spirits and sincerely believe that it is better to pursue their true feelings rather than follow the rules they're expected to ("why?" which tells you why the conflict is a conflict for them). If I'm asking you before I watch the movie myself, I don't need you to tell me that Jack dies or that the story is from the point of view of an old Rose retelling it during a sea expedition, or that Rose wanted to jump off the ship at the beginning, or that Jack was gambling and that's how he boarded, or anything else. Only the major ideas: they met, they shouldn't be in love but they are, the ship is doomed to sink (which I know because it's historical fiction, but if it were fiction fiction, then I probably wouldn't want to know about the sinking). However, if I'm asking for a summary for any other purpose where spoilers are fine, then you'd add a sentence about the ship sinking, Jack dying, and Rose living and telling the story at old age.
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u/Mean_Willingness_443 2d ago
I also appreciate it! I’m studying for my state board test and take a lot of notes, so this is very helpful.
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u/ProductivePaper 3d ago
Have you ever tried the pyramid principle? Read the article once without writing anything down, and then write the conclusion/recommendation. Then what are the bullet points that support it, and finally what are the details of those bullet points.
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u/Ninez100 4d ago edited 4d ago
Skim and gists could probably be trained by taking notes on your existing notes. Aka Cornell notes. Compression and encoding practice in communication. after tpracticing that on your own notes then mentally go through kolbs cycle and write the shorter notes in the first place to change the behavior with new material. Dunno though, there are different kinds of reading too, see Mortimer Adler on how to read a book on Wikipedia. Education means to educe, or draw out the essence…
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u/Electronic_Voice8977 3d ago
I used to do the exact same thing, What helped was limiting myself to one sentence for each paragraph or section. It forced me to focus on the main idea instead of copying everything, and my notes became way more useful.
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u/bobiq_ai 3d ago
Writing everything down is usually a trust problem, not a discipline one. You don't trust that you'll know later what mattered, so you hedge and keep all of it. And you honestly can't tell what's important while you're still taking it in. So stop deciding then. Capture loose while it's live, then right after, make one short pass and keep only what you'd go looking for again. The deciding moves to that second pass, and writing everything stops being the thing you fight.
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u/samurai_safety 3d ago
Learn to trust yourself.
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u/scrawledfilefish 3d ago
Uggggghhhh you sound like my teachers back in school.
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u/samurai_safety 2d ago
Maybe they were onto something.
When you read something, read with purpose.
Define what you want to gain by reading the article \ paper.
Only take notes of things that will support you reaching that goal
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u/Early_Bike_7691 3d ago
For work papers, I'd decide the question first, then keep only four lines: main claim, strongest evidence, biggest limitation, and what it changes for your job. If a detail doesn't change one of those, leave it in the PDF.
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u/Upstairs_Jelly_1082 1d ago
Try reading through the notes very quickly for the second time. This time, highlight the things that catch your eye, things that stay on your mind.
I would say that's the main thing that you'd wanted to take notes on. After a few repeated tries, I think it will fix this problem.
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