How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research

Writing personal summaries of what I encounter turns raw info into knowledge

I know a lot of reporters, and we often talk about various writing techniques: How to establish rapport with an interview subject, how to structure a long piece, how to stop procrastinating. (That last one is a biggie.)

But one thing we almost never talk about, I realize, is how to take notes when you’re doing research.

When I say “doing research” I mean specifically when I’m doing textual research — like, reading books or scholarly articles or news-site posts. (There’s a whole other art to taking notes when you’re interviewing someone, or doing on-the-scene reporting. That latter stuff, I’m not dealing with here.)

As it happens, my journalism often requires I read a mountain of material. For any given Wired column, for example, I might read dozens of white papers, reports, and news articles. I’ll also do ten or twelve interviews and transcribe them. When I’m researching a longer feature for a magazine? This number quickly grows to scores of documents, and several dozen interviews. And with a book — like my last one, Coders — we’re talking about literally hundreds and hundreds of documents (books, papers, etc) and several hundred transcribed interviews.