Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Taking Notes
David Pryde, The Highways of Literature; or, What to Read and How to Read (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, [1883]), pp. 20-21:
Cf. Captain Cuttle in Dickens' Dombey and Son: "When found, make a note of."
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Note-taking may thus be done in various ways, but done in some way it must be. Without it you cannot be intelligent readers. For how can you be intelligent without being discriminating; and how can you be discriminating without distinguishing between the good and the bad, the remarkable and the commonplace; and how can you distinguish between these without affixing some distinctive marks! You will find, too, that all great scholars have been great note-takers. They have proved themselves in their reading as well as in other things men of mark. Locke, Southey, Sir William Hamilton, never read without having their note-books and commonplace books beside them, into which they put, for future use, all the valuable facts and ideas upon which they alighted.I owe the reference to H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 49, who cites a different edition with different pagination however.
Cf. Captain Cuttle in Dickens' Dombey and Son: "When found, make a note of."
