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by linker3000 2553 days ago
Rewriting contemporary notes some time later adds another filter/interpretation to the information, and if you choose to remove or rewrite things that now don't seem relevant or accurate (rather than checking with the information giver), there's a risk that the notes become diluted or lose details that are re-graded as unimportant but later turn out to be the opposite.

Always best to write good, efficient, consistently-styled notes once, and annotate changes/corrections on them if they are needed. It saves time too!

1 comments

> Rewriting contemporary notes some time later adds [...] interpretation to the information..

Isn't this a fairly crucial part of "learning"?

Sure, write up stuff that supports your referral back to the original notes, or makes corrections and additions - but don't get rid of the original notes or replace them with interpreted copies.
The original article was talking about students learning in lectures. One might presume that the learning process ends with students being tested in a situation where they have no notes of any kind?

If that's true, then there's no point holding on to "the originals", because on the day of the test/exam/whatever, you won't have access to them anyway.

In essence, transferring knowledge from the original lecture via the written notes to ones memory?