Literature notes

[inkbottle]

The two approaches to Zettel below, one from Jethro, one from Luhmann (via Ahrens), seem to be quite different:

For each source, I create one and exactly one zettel.

Luhmann never underlined sentences in the text he read or wrote comments in the margins. All he did was take brief notes about the ideas that caught his attention in a text on a separate piece of paper: “I make a note with the bibliographic details. On the backside I would write ‘on page x is this, on page y is that,’ and then it goes into the bibliographic slip-box where I collect everything I read.

Maybe, keeping one note per file reduces cognitive load and avoids cluttering your mind, making it easier to be spontaneous.