Learning notes
DraftThis is where a topic starts. A learning note is what was understood during one study session, written while the understanding is still incomplete, with the uncertainty left visible.
Why notes come first
Writing directly into a subject section produces confident prose about something half-understood. The section pages are written in an assertive register, and that register applied to a topic still being learned produces text that reads as settled and is not.
A note is written in a different register. It records what was read, what was understood, what was not, and what to check. That is the honest state of new material, and keeping it separate protects the subject sections from absorbing half-formed understanding.
What belongs here
- One note per session or source
- Not one per topic. A topic accumulates several notes over time, and merging them prematurely loses the record of what was understood when.
- The source, always
- Book and chapter, paper and section, lecture and timestamp. A note without a source cannot be checked later and is close to worthless.
- The date
- Understanding changes. A note from two years ago may be superseded by a later one, and the dates are how that is resolved.
- What was not understood
- The most valuable part. A note recording confusion is a pointer to what to study next; a note recording only what was easy is a summary of the source.
Structure
A note does not need a rigid template, and the following headings are a useful default.
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Source | Full citation, enough to find it again |
| Question | What was being studied, and why |
| What I understood | The substance, in your own words rather than the source’s |
| What I did not | Specific gaps, phrased as questions where possible |
| Contradictions | Where this source disagrees with another, and which is more likely right |
| Next | What to read, derive or compute next |
The instruction to write in your own words is not stylistic. Reproducing a source’s phrasing is compatible with not understanding it; restating it is not. A note that cannot be written without copying is a note about a thing not yet learned, and recording that is itself useful.
When to promote
A note becomes a subject page when three conditions hold.
It is coherent. The topic can be explained from beginning to end without gaps that require the reader to already know the answer.
It has been checked. Numbers have been computed rather than recalled, derivations have been worked through rather than accepted, and claims trace to a source.
It is durable. The content is not specific to how it happened to be learned. A note reflecting one book’s idiosyncratic treatment is not yet a page.
Until then, it stays here. There is no cost to a note remaining a note, and there is a real cost to a section page that overstates its confidence. See How to add a note.
Relationship to the other lab pages
A note frequently spawns work rather than concluding it. Something unresolved becomes an entry in Questions I am exploring; a number that needs verifying becomes a calculation; behaviour that needs exploring becomes a simulation. Those results then feed back into the note.
What not to do
| Anti-pattern | Why it fails |
|---|---|
| Copying the source | Produces a note that cannot be distinguished from not having read it |
| Omitting what was unclear | Discards the most useful content |
| One enormous note per topic | Loses the chronology of understanding, and becomes unmaintainable |
| Editing old notes to reflect current understanding | Destroys the record. Write a new note and link to the old one |
| Promoting early | The subject sections then contain unchecked material presented confidently |
The fourth is the one most worth resisting. A note is a record of what was understood at a time, and rewriting it to match later understanding removes the evidence of how the understanding changed, which is often the interesting part.
References
Notes cite their own sources. This page has none, being a convention rather than a claim.