[chmielewski]

Whenever I'm taking notes, I tend to only write down things I don't already know or understand which tends to lead to shorter list-style notes, each bullet point a gem enticing me to research and eventually fold that concept or terminology into my understanding. If I've got pages and pages of things I wrote down which I already know or can get up and talk about for 20 minutes on the spot... the document may only be 80% useless but I'll treat it as absolutely useless and won't revisit it.

I write in block uppercase, regular lower-case, and cursive, depending on whether it's an action item, an interesting personal note or bit of extracurricular knowledge to follow-up on, or something to transcribe (knowledge or command to be archived) digitally after the note-taking session.

I make liberal use of parens, square brackets and curly braces, which add additional meaning to the different styles of handwriting I employ.