Feedback on approach to studying information heavy texts

Hi. I don’t fully follow your description, but one advice is:

Separate the note-taking phase from the note-organizing phase.

  • Note-taking takes place whenever something comes.
  • Note-organizing takes place whenever you can find some time.

Note organizing includes note rephrasing. Actually,

Serious note-organizing is the best way of learning on your own, as it forces you to read, rephrase, and of course think about each note within its relevant concepts. By the time you understand a note enough to organize it with confidence, you have also learned it.

Therefore, don’t avoid this phase, just don’t do it during note-taking.


During note-taking, don’t bother with the exact position of each note (may be a chapter or a journal or any page), rather bother with its references, so that you can find them again (I would not create a separate page for each chapter, but this is of secondary importance).

Mind that:

You can reference a page even if it doesn’t exist.

You could write it like this:

- [[Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism]]s (SNPs)
  - ...
- [[Copy Number Variation]]s (CNVs)
  - ...

This would create the references in the database, without creating the files. Do the same while keeping cancer-related notes.


During note-organizing, visit the referenced pages (SNP and CNV), see if they have enough linked references and transfer (cut-n-paste) the notes where they really belong. As about their previous position (i.e. their previous context), it is up to you whether you want to keep:

  • a reference (for less noise)
  • an embedding (for less clicks)
  • nothing at all (if that context has no value)

I left DNA variation for the end. It is ok if you reference that too, as it does deserve its own page. However, I suspect that a better organization would have it referenced from within SNP and CNV. But I don’t understand Genetics, so don’t take my word for it.

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