Taking notes on a separate document was certainly a new method of note taking for me, but after my brief experience with it thus far, I can tell that it will work quite well for me. Traditionally, I have taken notes through highlighting/underlining, with some notes in the margin. While this system might be adequate if I only need to return to a reading once for class discussion, it would be inadequate for full research because flipping through a reading to find the quote or note that I’m looking for over and over again while writing a paper would waste considerable time and become quite tiresome. However, with my notes in a single document, I can quickly look through the document, without having to skim past all the things I don’t need, and easily find what I am looking for.
The single downside to this method is that I might not pull as many things out of the reading to write down as I might with a highlight or underline. Admittedly, I often underline much more than I actually need to, but I also find that underlining forces me to read an important piece of the reading a second time, which helps me to absorb the material, even if I don’t use that exact piece later in a paper. My hope is that I will be reading my sources for my research more than once anyway, so I will not need the practice of underlining to help me read the material more than once for better comprehension.