That’s a big struggle for me. When I was learning about Zettelkasten, the idea of immediatly writing in your own words the summary of a chapter feels daunting. What if I use the wrong words and wouldn’t understand later? What I want is to have notes from the book and then use them to write summary maybe in a week after reading a chapter. I can’t just do it immediately. What do you think are some good ways to aproach telling in your own words?
@PsychrolutesMarcidus It’s definitely something that you have to practice, so don’t feel overwhelmed!
I personally don’t write a summary immediately, instead taking little notes of specific thoughts in the text I want to remember. Those little notes are in my own words. Then, I scan the notes to see how many talk about the same idea, and use my short notes as a framework to build a zettel.
It’s important that you understand the idea. If you lack understanding, it’s hard to write a zettel that encapsulates the idea well enough to sensibly use it years down the line.
There are no such things as wrong words. Just write things.
When you come here to post something in Lemmy, do you start shitting in your pants worrying about using the wrong words to write your comment? Probably not.
So why are you doing that when writing simple personal notes? You should worry about it even less than a Lemmy comment, since no one else will see your notes (probably).
I had a similar problem, in my experience is a skill that can be acquired rather quickly. I had nice results with SQR3 reading method, roughly like this:
- Skim the material, get the basic idea
- Think of several questions you have for this material, given it’s basic idea
- Read it again, slowly and thoroughly
- Go back to your questions and write down answers for them
Gradually this can get your more comfortable expressing things in your own language.
