How to Read an Article

Reading an article while scrolling “passively” and maybe taking a note on paper or whatsapp every now and then was what I always did, but it dawned on me yesterday that the process doesn’t have to be like this.

Taking notes on what I read shouldn’t be a secondary consideration, it should be a natural reflex while reading, and taking notes of an article outside it (on paper or on whatsapp or whatever) increases friction greatly.

Why not take notes of an article within the article? the same way you take notes of a book within a pdf editor?

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Before you begin

1. you’ll need a markdown editor, install one.
   • I personally use and recommend Obsidian
2. create an Articles/ folder within it.
   • this is where an article note (containing a webpage’s content) will be added.
3. create a template for an article note.
   

I personally use this template

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# Comments

It basically is a blank note, with a section at the bottom for comments (since comments get added to the bottom).

4. install the Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension.

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To Read an Article

1. create an article note inside Articles/.
2. within the article’s webpage, use the Web Clipper extension to capture the webpage.
3. copy the content to your clipboard.
4. paste it at the top of your article note.

… you now have the article locally on your PC and can do whatever u want with the information within it =)

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To Take Notes

1. install an obsidian plugin that allows you to add comments to highlighted text.
   • I personally use the Sidebar Highlights plugin.
2. highlight the text you want take a note on.
   • I use the Alt+H hotkey to do it.
3. open the highlights tab.
   • I use the Shift+Alt+H hotkey to do it.
4. locate the highlight you just created (it usually is at the bottom), and add a comment to it.

If the article has footnotes...

The Sidebar Highlights (and most plugins) use footnotes to link your highlighted text to its comments; if the article itself has footnotes, this will corrupt the linking process.

You have 2 options,

• you can either remove all footnotes from the article before reading.
• or you can manually change the footnote index of the very 1st comment to maybe a [^100] instead of [^1]

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To Save a Reading Checkpoint

Choose a tag to denote what a checkpoint is.

• I personally use a #left-off tag.

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1. remove any previous checkpoint/s by replacing them with nothing using the find and replace tool.
2. add a #left-off tag where u stopped.
   • do not place it in a newline or add spaces before and after it (since removing it later won’t also remove those ghost spaces)

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Related Notes

Thumbnail	Note	Type

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Sources