Smart notes represent one of the most valuable concepts I discovered in my exploration of personal knowledge management. A smart note is a note that can stand alone at a future day as providing sufficient information that you or someone else does not have to have access to the original source. For a writer, I like to describe the idea as doing some of your writing early to make later writing more efficient.
Examples can help. The following is a smart note I generated while reading a book about the reading wars. I hope you can see what I mean by containing the context necessary to be useful at a later time. I thought others might find this note interesting. The citation is included and I do this because I make use of citations in most of the things I write.
Johns, A. (2023). The science of reading: Information, media, and mind in modern America. In The Science of Reading. University of Chicago Press.
Interesting story from this author. Following the release of Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read”, there was a backlash against textbook publishers not focusing their materials on a phonics-based approach. In 1955, William Spalding the head of the education division of Houghton Mifflin turned to an old army buddy for help because he was concerned for the public image of his materials. Ted Geisel had an interest in rhyming material for children. Spalding wanted reading materials that took advantage of rhymes, would be of great interest, and were based on a limited word list. He developed a 225 list he gave to Geisel. Geisel tried for some time to come up with an approach. Finally, he took the first two words from the list “Cat” and “Hat” and started from there. Of course, Geisel is better known as Dr. Seuss and the book he produced was “The cat in the hat”. The author claims the Cat in the hat is possibly the most impactful poem of the 20th century.