## THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE NOTE-TAKING - Maarten van Doorn
Source URL:: <https://maartenvandoorn.com/en/roam-zettelkasten/>
Without taking notes, reading is a waste of time. How to craft your Zettelkasten of atomic notes in Roam
### Highlights
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> his would be good because the second thing learning requires is that you put the material in your own words. It’s the most important thing if you want to understand and learn for the long run. It is an excellent test of your comprehension. The highlighting-and-tagging method is not. Remove jargon, explain why this information is relevant, and offer your interpretation. It sounds simple, but it is damn hard and demonstrates your understanding of the subject matter. This method might be counterintuitive. I also felt like I was getting smarter because I dutifully highlighted, exported to Roam, and tagged all my blocks.
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> ATOMICITY: ONE IDEA PER NOTE
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>I will assume, in this guide, that one of your note-making goals is to turn what you’ve read into written output. Good writers know to keep one idea to one paragraph in an essay. If you begin to transition into a new idea, it belongs in a new paragraph. Likewise, it’s a rule of good note-taking to keep one thought to one note. This is called the principle of atomicity. These two rules are closely related because their combination means that one note should equal one paragraph in an essay (one idea, one node in a chain of thought).
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> ECLARATIVE STATEMENTS AS TITLES
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>Figure 10. Note titles with atomic declarative phrases (Credit: Maarten van Doorn)
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>Essentially, there are two approaches to titling your notes. Some people use ‘concept titles,’ such as “Political campaigns” or “Plato.” When they encounter information about this subject, it goes in the note. Of course, this is equivalent to highlighting + tagging. You end up with an unordered list of blocks/passages, whether on the page itself or in the linked references section. Others use claims as titles, such as “Political campaigns are generally ineffective at changing people’s minds.” There are a couple of reasons why the claims approach works better.
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> First, the title should tell you what’s in the note. ‘Concept titles,’ such as “Political campaigns” don’t do this. They just inform you in a hand-wavy way, “Hey, there’s some general information about political campaigns in here.” But what exactly is it? This means I’ll need to interpret what it is any time I might want to link to this note. This is time-consuming, you’ll tire of it and the note slowly dies.
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> hat’s because the note contains unorganized, general information about multiple claims and ideas. How can you connect it to other notes with relationships such as “Evidence against,” “Explanation of,” and so on? It would be unclear which of the multiple claims and ideas would be explained disproven, etc. which would make the link structure a total mess and, as a consequence, practically useless.