Solid gold creativity

I’ve always enjoyed note-taking.  My method was established early.

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In General Lecture Theatre One at Sydney University a law lecturer named Shirley, with too black hair, used to give us dictation lessons in the Rules of Evidence,

… that’s R. v Jones, open bracket, 1976, close bracket, Commonwealth, full stop.  New paragraph …

Along with a hopeless fixation on the verbatim, it was in that class I acquired the nasty habit of devouring paper by the ream.  I’d often scrawl no more than 10 words on each page, as if by churning through the paper I’d convince myself I hadn’t missed anything. 

It was also in that class my fascination with shorthand was born.  Because the girl I sat next to, Elizabeth, had that magic skill and every so often she’d throw me a crumb:

• a “whether” (like a tick), or
• a “because” (like a tilde with a closed hook at the end), or
• a “between” (the onomatopoeia of shorthand: a dash with arrows at each end like so, <->). 

To this day, when I need to take longhand notes, I still fill up many pages with just a few words on each.  And I still spend the time longing to know shorthand.  The only difference now is my longhand has deteriorated to such an extent that unless I transcribe the notes within a couple of hours of taking them, they are lost to eternity.

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What Shirley missed about lecturing was a basic tenet of the law itself: there is both the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.  Shirley was all letter.  And this same concept, of letter and spirit, applies equally well to note-taking.  To be a good note-taker is to capture both.

Which is where my second lecturer comes in.  A pyschobiologist given to making jokes about L-dopa (“what’s the name of that South American dictator?”) and telling stories rather than lecturing, I learnt from him about spirit. 

I used to sit on the train home after his class reviewing my notes and making notes on my notes.  I used to re-write things, raise new points, ask questions, make connections, all in the margins.  And in this way, I’d make the lecture my own; I’d internalise it, incorporate it, until, come exam time, I topped the year without even studying.  It was all in the note-taking, in the making notes on the notes.  And no doubt, my L-dopa friend’s lecturing skills.

Given its success and the pleasure of doing it, this kind of “embroidery” of the notes after the fact also became a vital part of my note-taking.

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All of these note-taking tics I brought to my job as a management consultant.  Here the task is not merely to sit back and listen to a lecture, but to lead one or more subjects through an interview, evaluate what they’re saying, and take notes at the same time.

Sometimes there’ll be another consultant to take notes.  But for those times where there isn’t, there are a few options:

• scrawl on paper using longhand
• type directly onto a laptop
• record the interview using a digital recorder.

I’ve recorded a few interviews.  The problem with it is that it confers a dangerous sense of coasting, as in “I don’t really need to pay too much attention because the little machine’s capturing it all and I can always listen later.”  Only thing is, later, it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time and the work of evaluation and analysis gets off to a belated, and somewhat removed, start.  And recording doesn’t work for phone interviews.

Typing directly onto a laptop is the least time-consuming.  However, again, you can only use a laptop in some situations.  Plus, unless another consultant is going to do the typing, the laptop can impede the communication. 

For these reasons among others, I still prefer the first method: scrawling on paper using longhand.  I still aim to get the notes verbatim, my scrawl is more indecipherable than ever and it’s hugely time-consuming to type up the notes afterwards.

But the lesson I learnt in psychobiology still guides me.  It’s in re-doing the notes and interrogating them that the inspired analysis lies.  I also think there may be something to the fact that the original transcript is made by my own hand.  Something about the notes already being partly incorporated, in the most literal sense.

The one option that haunts me is shorthand.  I would still dearly love to try it.  It seems to have all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages of the other methods.  It’s verbatim, manual, quick and can be used in any situation.

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