reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

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Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-rise-of-communism-from-marx-to-lenin
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/communism-in-power-from-stalin-to-mao
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/legacies-of-great-economists
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/modern-intellectual-tradition-from-descartes-to-derrida

These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/9704917

Vimeo collection of Dan Alloso's work with respect to his book How to Make Notes and Write.

Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.

Annotatable .pdf copy for Hypothes.is: https://docdrop.org/pdf/How-to-Make-Notes-and-Write---Allosso-Dan-jzdq8.pdf/

Nota Bene:

These annotations are of a an early pre-release draft of the text. One ought to download the most recent revised/final/official draft at https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.

A manual on note taking practice that Blair quotes along with Paul Chavigny as being influential in the early 21st century.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/announcing-how-to-make-notes-and

Congratulations @danallosso!

For those curious about the idea of what students might do with the notes and annotations they're making in the margins of their texts using Hypothes.is, I would submit that Dan Allosso's OER handbook How to Make Notes and Write (Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022) may be a very useful place to turn. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/

It provides some concrete advice on the topic of once you've highlighted and annotated various texts for a course, how might you then turn your new understanding, ideas, and extant thinking work into a blogpost, essay, term paper or thesis.

For a similar, but alternative take, the book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens (Create Space, 2017) may also be helpful as well. This text however requires purchase via Amazon and doesn't carry the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (by-nc-sa 4.0) license that Dr. Allosso's does.

In addition to the online copy of the book, there's an annotatable .pdf copy available here: http://docdrop.org/pdf/How-to-Make-Notes-and-Write---Allosso-Dan-jzdq8.pdf/ though one can download .epub and .pdf copies directly from the Pressbooks site.

much as poflible in the open Air. YOU muft feed upon a warm and cordial Diet, enrich’d with a great deal of Muflard, Nutmeg, Horfe-radijh and Garden, l Crejfes ;'at the lame Time avoiding every''"j thing that is aftringent, flegmatick, and 1 windy. And let your Drink be Beer, M brew’d with Sorrel-Leaves , or elfe Ground 1 Ivy-Tea . • 1 T O prevent this Complaint, young Women muft Ihake off Sloth, and make Ufe of their Legs, as well as their Hands* - They Ihou’d be cautious of taking Opiates j too often, or Jefuits-Bark , except in Cafes of great Neceffity; nor muft they long foie pretty Fellows, or any other Trajb whatfoe- ver.

https://archive.org/details/2574010R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n47/mode/2up?q=misfortune

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

Some florilegia were used as handbooks to teach composition. Those with poetic excerpts were used to teach prosody while others specialized in prose.

Examples of these sorts of florilegia include Micon Centulensis' Opus prosodiacum from the mid-ninth century and a Collectanea by Heiric who wrote under dictation from Lupus of Ferrières, ca. 859–62.

references

references to look up

Mortimer J. Adler, eat your heart out.

The first manuals of advice about how to take notes began in the early modern period during the fifteenth century.

https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_

An interesting looking assignment for creating a commonplace book.

Annotations for the .pdf document available here: https://hyp.is/B7BXuArgEeyJB5PFTw2x2A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Creating-a-Commonplace-Book---Kennedy-Colleen-E_-0r3r1.pdf

Students used offcuts (or scraps) of parchment for writing notes on in class.

It's been quite a long way since Cicero's eye-rolling at handbooks...