
Saved by Madeline
Annotate This: On Marginalia
Saved by Madeline
I also put checkmarks next to sentences or concepts that pique my interest, but a question hasn’t yet formed. Two checkmarks mean my interest is really piqued, three checkmarks mean my interest is off the charts. A star indicates this is key to the interview even if the question isn’t yet there. Two or three stars mean YES! YES! YES!
“Marginalia” refers to the marks made in the margins of a book or other document, including scribbles, comments, annotations, critiques, doodles, or illustrations.
This passage from Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, which is discussing Darwin’s use of keeping a commonplace book (a practice I have always loved myself) as a vital part of where his most important ideas came from, just jumped off the page at me:
“The great minds of the period —Milton, Bacon, Locke were zealous believers in the memory-en
... See moreanyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book.