A peek at the notes that make a newsletter

Welcome, listeners of The Informed Life!

If you listened to me talking with Jorge Arango on his podcast The Informed Life in April 2022, then you’re in the right place for links and photos to all we talked about, plus a couple extras.

If you’re a reader of Finding Out and wondering what this is all about, then go check out The Informed life episode “Veronica Erb on Annotating Books.”

In March, Jorge posed a question to Twitter.

Jorge Arango @jarango

When you’re reading to learn (e.g., a book related to your work/study), how do you track what you’ve learned? Do you highlight/annotate the book itself? Write in a separate notebook? Something else? (Nothing at all?)

I crammed the highlights of my practice in a few tweets.

Veronica Erb @verbistheword

@jarango If I can tell or decide a book is going to be really important to me, I make sure I have a hard copy and mark it up (underlining, marginalia occasionally including tiny illustrations) in pencil. I save digital articles in OneNote notebooks that I mark up with (Apple) Pencil.

Veronica Erb @verbistheword

@jarango I've also experimented with keeping either physical or digital commonplace books, but haven't really found a good rhythm for them.

Veronica Erb @verbistheword

@jarango It's all a part of my interest in making time to think _deep_ instead of always getting swept away by the fleeting interests our tech worlds regularly encourage us to follow.

And to my delight, the two of us decided to discuss more on his podcast. In the episode, we chatted about a few different examples of notes I've taken.

I drew a tiny map of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana when Roxane Gay described the cities (including my home of St. Louis, MO) that she could drive to from the university where she taught. The description and my note are on page 23 of her excellent book of essays, Bad Feminist.

When I was having trouble keeping different epistemologies in my head, I combined the abstract description from Michael Crotty's text with a typical example from a philosophy professor's class to show how the epistemologies would explain how a tree came to mean all that a tree means. The description and my note are on page 9 of my copy of The Foundations of Social Research.

While I don't often draw pictures in the margins, these two examples show how notes help me understand the information I consume, in addition to summarizing it.

I also take notes for this newsletter. Issues start out in OneNote as a subject and maybe a bulleted list of topics or stories I might include or goals I might try to achieve with the essay. While I'm drafting, rather than keeping track of multiple files, I push initial thoughts and rejected paragraphs down the page, so they're easy to find later if I need them without having to remember which note is in which file.

Here you can see the notes pushed to the bottom of my draft of the Taking Notes for Now and Later issue, which include both hints of content and messages (aka goals) that I want the essay to convey.

As I make progress on multiple drafts, the titles get coded with light bulb emojis for notes I'm coming back to and love letter emojis for essays or other content I've published.

Here you can see my most recent drafts, some in progress, some abandoned for the time being, and some published. Alongside, there’s an in-progress version of this post.

I take these notes as a key part of writing my newsletter, without burdening myself with unnecessary process or reliance on software that will probably, over time, go away.

Thank you for taking a listen and a look at two of the ways I take notes! I hope you've enjoyed thinking about your own notetaking, too.

In the podcast, I also attempted to summarize part of a talk by danah boyd that really got me thinking about meaning. Here’s what she said originally in her talk “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?,” about the work by Francesca Tripodi (who is a sociologist, not an anthrologist, as I misremembered in the podcast):

In 2017, sociologist Francesca Tripodi was trying to understand how conservative communities made sense of the seemingly contradictory words coming out of the mouth of the US President. Along her path, she encountered people talking about making sense of The Word when referencing his speeches. She began accompanying people in her study to their bible study groups. Then it clicked. Trained on critically interrogating biblical texts, evangelical conservative communities were not taking Trump’s messages as literal text. They were interpreting their meanings using the same epistemological framework as they approached the bible. Metaphors and constructs matter more than the precision of words.

And if you're looking for links to the other references I mentioned on the podcast episode with Jorge, check out the companion issue of Finding Out, "Taking Notes for Now and Later." Cheers!

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Mentioned in this post: Michael Crotty's The Foundations of Social Research and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.