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Comment by EdwardCoffin | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that it was not generally expected that notes taken by one person would be interpretable by another. This is what I've been told by my mother, who learned and used Pitman shorthand. She says she never had to read anyone else's notes, nor did anyone else ever have a need to read hers.

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Reading other people's shorthand was common in larger companies. One secretary would take dictation, and pass it off to another secretary to type it up.

Typing is slower than taking dictation, so you'd potentially have multiple typists typing up the same person's dictated letters at once.

This is largely why note taking is a two pass process for me. The first is the pen and paper notes taken while speaking with someone else. The second is the process of transcribing and editing those notes onto some digital medium. I end up with a really nicely fleshed out document covering much more information, much more thoroughly. For example, for a more complex point in a discussion I may add an additional paragraph or two of background and context to what was actually talked about.

I've found this process to be the best I've tried, and others who I share my notes with have voiced their liking.

If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them, you shouldn't even bother taking them. I don't think there are very many exceptions for write-once-and-never-read notes. Note amplification is stronger if your intent is to explain the notes to someone else.

> If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them, you shouldn't even bother taking them.

Beethoven would disagree with you,

    Beethoven left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks.
    Yet he himself said he never looked at a sketchbook
    when he actually wrote his compositions. When asked, "Why
    then, do you keep a sketchbook?" he is reported to
    answered, "If I don't write it down immediately I forget it
    right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and
    I never have to look it up again.

Source: http://books.google.no/books?id=1YN3kc31nqAC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA...

Yes, he may have disagreed, but most of us aren't savants with a perfect recall strategy such as this because, well, we need the inhibition to support other functions.

This is also true for me, I almost always took notes in college but it was rare for me to read them except to retrieve formulas that weren't in the course notes.

Jill Price (the Woman who remembers everything)[0] also compulsively kept a journal. What is it about the connection between writing instrument and human brain that doesn't extend to QWERTY? Price also didn't refer back to her journals from what I can tell.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Price

This might be of some help : http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/writing-and-re...

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