Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Over the years, I have never, ever written in a book that I was reading. Way back when I was in school, I simply wrote notes in a spiral notebook. More recently, I had note cards and wrote the notes with a book and page notation.
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I have, but I found that writing in a spiral notebook is better. (Although I would sometimes highlight in the book).
The advantage of writing in a notebook is that you have all of the notes for a particular book in one place, and it's easier to look over your notes as a whole than to flip to various dog-eared places in the book.
Notebooks also give you more space to write than writing in the margin. Particularly the margin of a paperback.
A notebook also makes it easier to compare several books.
One of the issues with Adler's approach is that it works best when you are re-reading a book and thus have some specific idea about what you want to pay attention to. (Not doing that leads to the used books most people have encountered in college, where the previous reader highlighted every sentence).
In the example of "Persuasion," - unless you start off with the idea that you are just going to underline every instance of the word because it's in the title - you won't notice anything unusual until you are most of the way through the book and it occurs to you that there might be something interesting going on with the word. With an e-reader, you can quickly search for all instances...which can lead to some really interesting results.
The only real advantage I could see to writing in the book itself is that if you reread it 20 years later, you can see what you thought of it 20 years ago. Which is not always an advantage.