I took a lot of notes today. I have a growing collection of typed up notes from various things I have read of late which is a great source to go back to. I do a lot of highlighting or tabbing (if I don’t own the book or a photococpy) of what I read and then type up these tabbed or highlighted passages and/or notes/summaries/responses to them.
Not only is this very time consuming but I am really worried about whether or not this method is any good. Unlike some, after having read a book or book, I soon forget both the details, argument, and even interesting points found in it. Thus, I feel like to gain something from the activity, I must make some “record” of my having read it. While I may never review these notes, at least I have them to refer to, thus ideally acting as a “substitute” for engaging a given, perhaps difficult, text again at a later date. So far this has been in the form of selecting quotes and passages that I feel represent the important arguments or points in a passage.
However, I am worried about whether this is really a good method. I would ideally like to take “notes of notes” (which a professor of mine once insisted as the best method) where a second pass over notes reduce your notes even further to a short readable narrative. However, I find that going back to my notes, I can hardly reconstruct that narrative. Even after reading a chapter I don’t feel confident enough in my ability to summarize an argument coherently or even have the energy to recreate it with a more free interplay of my own ideas with the text. I feel that this act “violates” the text in a way. This of course, may reveal more about my lack of attention in reading than my lack of skill in note taking. However, I suspect there is a deeper problem which I only barely understand. It is the problem of negotiating my relationship with a given text and of certain problematic assumptions I have long held about the status of my role as reader. I think I am reading too much theory…I can’t think straight.