Keep your pencil out of the source

“This doesn’t follow” is a perfectly reasonable reading note. Three months later, it is also a small mystery.

What didn’t follow? A conclusion, a recommendation, the sentence immediately above? And was the objection about the evidence or just the way the paragraph was written?

The problem gets worse if you typed the comment directly into a copy of the source and later forgot where your writing began. Now you have both an unexplained objection and an uncertain document.

Good reading notes need two things that pull in different directions: a clear separation from the source, and a close enough connection that you can recover what prompted them.

Separate the voices

Suppose you are reading a committee report about evening bus services. The report recommends a trial on two routes. Your response is that the proposal does not explain how the routes were chosen.

If you insert “Why these two?” into the report’s body, the question is conveniently placed but the distinction between source and commentary now depends on your formatting convention. That may be manageable in a deliberate annotated copy. It is less comfortable in a file you also treat as the original.

A separate note can preserve the distinction explicitly:

Section “Proposed trial”, paragraph 3: the report names two routes but does not explain the selection. Find out whether demand, cost or depot location determined the choice.

This takes a few more words than “Why these two?” It gives your future self something to investigate. It also leaves room for the possibility that the explanation exists elsewhere and you simply haven’t found it yet.

Record a handle, not a second document

A section title, short quotation or distinctive phrase can act as a handle back into the source. Include enough to locate the passage. Copying five paragraphs into your notes just to preserve one uncertainty usually creates more reading, not more clarity.

Specific headings help when you control the source structure. When you don’t, use the source’s own labels, a page number if it has stable pages, or a short quoted phrase. Distinguish an exact quotation from your paraphrase; the two have different uses later.

The note should also reveal its status. “The trial excludes rural routes” sounds like an established finding. “Check whether the trial excludes rural routes” records an open question. If you discover the answer, add it with the supporting location instead of leaving the original uncertainty to masquerade as unfinished work.

Know which material travels

In Clarity, document Notes sit beside the reading and save as separate local Markdown files. The note box shows plain text, including any Markdown you type. Your comments do not become part of the source document’s body.

That separation has a practical consequence: copying only the source file in Finder does not carry its notes. Clarity’s export can include them. Decide what you are sharing before sending a source to someone else: the original, your commentary, or both.

For a substantial response, make the commentary a document of its own. You can then read it beside the source and develop an argument rather than squeezing one into a reminder box. A reading note can begin that work, but it need not accommodate the whole essay.