I’m not happy with my writing in Notion recently as I’m mostly putting random word pieces there, not even a paragraph. Sometimes I feel that I have a sudden realization of something then I told myself to write it down, but normally it ended up in a few keywords in a tab in Notion and never got opened again. The bright side is that these pieces of ideas could become my inspiration bank, though the other side is that I didn’t really think it through but just had the illusion that I knew it.
The same thing goes for literature review. Sometimes I spent hours reading paper one after another and thought I’d get them all once I read over. Then the truth is that I only remember an overly simplified description or even just some keywords, without any of my own reflection or takeaway from them. However, I found it makes a lot of difference if I immediately write a short reflection in paragraphs. This happened for the weekly discussion post of my HCI class. Normally there are three readings per week and the rule is to read them all and write reflections. The readings are lengthy, sometimes theoretic and obscure. It was a hard in the beginning as I wanted to understand every single word but the time is short. Later on, I found that even if I only had a general idea of the topic, there are always new thoughts coming up as I’m writing things down and ultimately all ideas in my writing are the main takeaways that I can recall afterwards.
Perhaps writing it down is when the mental process really starts to obtain new knowledge. It’s intensive, time-consuming but also leads to a more fruitful outcome. When I look back after a while, these writing reflections can recall my interpretations and inspirations from these readings immediately. If I read it again, I can build on my previous understanding and any additional new findings would get me excited.
That’s all about my little reflection on writing. I think the main idea is that writing is never an easy process as our brain is working so hard to putting pieces together and visualize the important message in the form of written language. Maybe discussing with others has similar effects too, as these scattered ideas in our mind are organized and translated into languages. One big difference is that we don’t have as much time of deep thinking and reflecting, but maybe the constant stimulus from the interlocutor and the fast information exchange is the conversational way for gaining new knowledge.
