The beauty of notes

One of the little gems I discovered in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows relates to the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus who, in his 1512 textbook De Copia encouraged students to annotate their books, in order to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples and pithy remarks worth memorising”.

Erasmus also advised every student and teacher to keep a notebook, organised by subject, “so that whenever je lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.”

What Erasmus could not have foretold was that his words of wisdom would still ring true almost exactly 500 years later but using the latest technology.

I have always furiously defaced my books with pens and highlighters, much to the astonishment of others who regard this as sacrilege. Now I’ve switched much of my reading to the Kindle, I can still do this, but without causing any actual damage to the book. I’m finding the ability to highlight sections so that they appear in my own, downloadable clippings folder extremely useful, although I’m not so keen on making my own notes with the tiny keyboard. I’ve started copying the clippings for each book to separate notes in Evernote, from where they can be accessed easily for incorporation in blog postings and articles.

And talking of Evernote, that’s where I fulfil the second of Erasmus’ recommendations. I have a space in Evernote for every topic and this allows me to collect ideas in an orderly way. And where notes cross-reference to several topics I can find them easily using the tagging system.

While paper notebooks can get lost, are cumbersome to carry around and fill up, Evernote is secure in the cloud, available on every computer and mobile device I use and unlimited in capacity. Erasmus would have been thrilled.