3 of Seneca's Metaphors for Taking Notes

Good input=good output: to be a great writer, we must be great readers. I’ve found that the quality of the texts I read influences the quality of the writing I produce.

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious... See more

Seneca highlights the importance of “digesting” our reading so that we can make it our own.

So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the re

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Prioritize the whole rather than the parts : when it comes to writing, often we want to share more than would benefit the piece. In my final edits, I often delete factoids and quotations that interest me but detract from my overall message. As I tell my students, good writing is good editing. Take out all the bits that don’t benefit the whole.