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Comment by sakras | Hacker News Reader

People who write in books: what do you write? I remember being forced to write on sticky notes in high school, and trying several times afterwards, and I just don’t get it. I see the phrase “engaging with the writing” thrown around by proponents. What does “engaging” mean here?

In regards to letting books get scuffed up, I must say I disagree as well. I like to keep all of my things shiny and new, and my books are no exception.

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I have a few different ways of marking up a text. In one approach, I make a small vertical line in the margin next to a line I find significant. Sometimes that vertical line extends down a few lines to mark a longer passage. If it's really important, I add a second line, and sometimes I'll even add a third line.

For many books, this is just a way of mentally noting something and letting it go enough to move on. But if I end up wanting to write a review of a book (usually a blog post, not a bookstore review), I just skim through these marked up sections. That's usually enough to guide my write up. The triple-marked sections usually end up quoted in the review.

I also write a capital R in the margin next to things I'd like to research further. Sometimes I put a question mark next to a section I'm skeptical of.

I don't usually write in fiction, but with nonfiction and especially technical writing (like O'Reilly books) I find taking notes helpful, and the book itself is the most convenient place up do so. I'll underline important words or phrases, ask questions, raise concerns, recall definitions from earlier.

I find doing this helps keep me honest about whether I'm understanding what I'm reading or just glossing through it, and it helps pace my engagement. If I can't come up with one question or comment per page, I've probably lost focus.

You may be interested in the short article by Mortimer Adler, 'How to Mark a Book'[1] (he also expands greatly on this in his book titled 'How to Read a Book').

[1]: https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-...

Engaging means thinking about the author’s words as in you’re in a debate/discussion. You may agree, but notice something you need to research more about. You may disagree and not down why you do. You may want to summarize the point he is making. You may want to link it to another work. For myself, I don’t really do it if I’m new to the subject, maybe a few lines about each chapter. But once I’ve read a few different books, I’m starting to form my own opinion or try to link concepts across books. This is what my notes are about.

Why would you write those notes in the book? To find the note, you'd have to find the thing you were writing the note about (i.e. the passage on the page), so then what do you need the note for?

The idea is when you return to that idea, you already have some context of where it lead you last time you read. Returning to that later allows you to keep building.

The usual: underlining, highlighting, and bracketing paragraphs of note.

I dog-ear pages that include a lesson that I really wish to internalize and take away from the book. Something I expect to revisit often.

On top of that, I’m writing in the margins. Questions I have about what the author has written, counter-arguments when I disagree, check-boxes with descriptions of actionable tasks I can do, tangential thoughts that were inspired in the course of reading (often unrelated), ideas that I think might combine well with an insight by the author, and generally anything that I think about in the process of writing.

I've never been one to do more than underline in a paper book. I have nothing against writing in margins, etc., but I find there simply isn't enough room to write what I want to write. This is a benefit of Kindle (and perhaps other) ebooks -- you can write a note of whatever length, and download it later.

Largely it is bracketing in the margin, sometime underlining. Sometimes it can be a page reference.

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