Reading research · Lesson 3 of 3

Level 4, and notes that survive six months

Typed notes with a source, plus two sentences in your own words, are what makes reading cumulative rather than repeated.

8 min read · Free — no account needed to read

Level 4, expert reading, is for papers you are building directly on or arguing with. You reconstruct the argument in your own words, evaluate the identification strategy — how do they know it is this and not something else — examine robustness, compare it with the other papers making competing claims, and locate precisely where you agree and diverge. This is the reading that produces original contributions, and most papers never need it.

Whatever the level, notes are what makes reading cumulative. Highlighting is not note-taking: it marks where something was without recording what it meant, which is why a highlighted PDF is almost useless six months later.

What survives is notes with a type and a source. This product uses five types deliberately: Quote — their words exactly, for when wording matters; Evidence — something that supports or contradicts a claim of yours; Method — how they did it, for when you need designs that worked; Limitation — a weakness worth remembering when citing; Note — your own thought, which is the most valuable and the least often recorded.

Every note should carry the paper and the page. Not bureaucracy — it is what lets you check a claim later, cite accurately, and answer "where did I get that?" without rereading everything.

And a discipline that repays itself many times: after each paper, write two sentences in your own words — what it found and why it matters to you. If you cannot, you did not finish the level you thought you were on. The two sentences are the thing you will actually use when you write.

See it happen

Six months ago you read 30 papers and highlighted extensively. You now need to write the literature review.

The read that arrives on its own

Open the PDFs, reread the highlights, and assemble the review from them.

The same situation, with this idea

You find the highlights mark passages that seemed important with no record of why, so you are effectively rereading 30 papers. The papers where you wrote two sentences are immediately usable. The cost was about three minutes each at the time; the cost of not having them is a week now. You write the two sentences for the remaining papers as you go.

After this, you can

write two sentences per paper at the time, because later-you cannot reconstruct why a passage was marked.

The takeaway

Typed notes with a source, plus two sentences in your own words, are what makes reading cumulative rather than repeated.

Easy to take the wrong way

That more notes are better. Twenty highlights and no summary is worse than no highlights and two good sentences.

Try this

Go back to a paper you read recently and write the two sentences now. Notice whether you can.