Main idea

A page that gathers notes is tempted to summarise them along the way, so the reader does not have to open them. The result is an impoverished copy: the content is there twice, it will diverge at the first update, and the reader is reading a degraded version of what they could have read at the source.

What a copied-out note does not say is what it is doing there. A poorly contextualised price objection and messaging disconnected from the customer's situation are two observations; saying that the first is a symptom of the second is the only content the page adds. The value is in the verb that connects — cause, consequence, qualification, tension, counter-example — not in the terms it connects.

Assembling notes therefore means putting them in conversation, not replacing them. Each keeps carrying its own point; the page says what they do to one another.

Why it matters

This settles what has to be written and what should be left alone, and makes the page much shorter. Time spent rephrasing the content of the notes is time taken from the one thing nobody else will write: the relationship.

It also protects against divergence. A relationship stays true as the note evolves; a summary, for its part, becomes false without warning, and nothing signals that the two texts no longer say the same thing.

Nuances and limits

A reader who does not have the notes in front of them needs a minimum: naming a note without saying anything about it makes the relationship incomprehensible. The right dose is the sentence that suffices to situate, not the paragraph that restates.

And some relationships can only be stated by quoting precisely — a contradiction between two notes is hard to show without taking up both exact formulations.

Open questions

• How much content can be taken from a note before the reader stops going to read it?