Note taking by doodling is fun
From WorldCon 2018
I thought it might be fun to show some of my other notes that I’ve taken in Notability. I use an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, so that makes it easy to draw. I would say the only issue I have with Notability is that I can’t figure out how to export it as an image. So I end up exporting it as a PDF and then converting the PDF into an image. I’m sure that’s because the Notability folks assume I’m going to use the keyboard to get actual text into it (or convert my tortured scribbles into text using the OCR). But it still makes it one step more when all I want to do is shove it into an image to put up on a blog page.
This session was on horses, so it fits…
At any rate, most of my notes are very boring, or are filled with pictures of horse heads, but in this session I was really inspired to draw what they were talking about.
If the session is really interesting, I write more words down. I’ve been trying to teach myself the art of artist notes (my friend calls them bullet journals – I think of bullet journals as something else, but whatevs) style of not taking. But I tend to only draw cartoonish animals, ugly landscapes (a la Bob Ross), and random dots and shapes. I also like drawing pictures of crows:
At least this one referenced a crow…
Sometimes I doodle dogs with crowns, or dinosaur hedgehogs…
I think my favorite quote from the note page above is “you’ll get all the criticism you need from your enemies for free.” HAH! I get a lot from my writing group (The Barnsian Nobility, shout out!), but their criticism is really useful and has only made me go back and rethink all my life’s choices once or possibly twice.
I do find note taking a lot more enjoyable now that I’ve allowed myself to doodle while I do it. Too bad I didn’t figure that out in college. But back then I was determined to take notes “the right way.”
I was also frustrated that I didn’t know what the best way to highlight books was. Answer: don’t highlight any books - you never go back and look at the highlights and it just reduces the amount the bookstore might pay to buy them back from you. Does it date me that I think college bookstores might buy books back from students?