A Simple Way to Write Cornell Notes in Roam Research
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There’s no getting around it, we all need good note-taking habits, some of us just haven’t realized it yet.
I’m guessing you’re here because somethings clicked recently. If you’ve been anywhere on the Internet recently, you’ve probably gone down some twitter rabbit-holes or watched a dozen youtube videos with titles like: “Note-taking to get a perfect score on the ___ test”, “how I got through med school with note-taking”, “10 productivity tips for effective note-taking at work/school”.
Maybe you’re in a new phase of intensity at University and you feel the need to build a “second brain”.
Or maybe you work in a knowledge intensive field or you’re pushing your knowledge ops to a new level at your work.
No matter the need, settling on a tried and true note-taking scheme will be essential for forward movement. There’s a reason why specialty note-taking books & apps are skyrocketing in popularity. For me, Roam Research has been the killer app that I can’t help but jump into and write in every day, ever since it clicked last fall.
With every app, a slew of note-taking systems are adapted to build in those apps. Trying to keep up with the acronyms can be intense: PKM, XYLO, GTD, STFU, BASB (I’ll let you guess which of those acronyms are made up).
And yet, while it’s awesome to eat a fancy Michelin star restaurant, there’s always something special about that one restaurant back home that never lets you down. In the note-taking world, that classic option is: Cornell Notes.
So, I thought we could all use a little refresher on one of the classics and think about how to use it with Roam Research. Maybe it’ll be a mainstay, or maybe it will be a stepping stones to an ‘acronym system’ of your choice. As always, we’ll start simple, because a system that is replicable and low on friction is better than an elaborate one that doesn’t get used. Plus, it’s great for beginners and those early in their personal knowledge app journey.
A quick refresher on Cornell Notes
Why have ‘Cornell Notes’ had such staying power in the note-taking world? Even if you’re not a committed user, it’s doubtless you’ve heard them regularly recommended from your teachers or professors, or sat next to that one kid with 20 different color of pens and great handwriting who used them constantly (the ‘tools for thought’ nerds of the 80s and 90s). Well it comes down to one word: simplicity.
Cornell Notes are so simple & powerful, you’ve probably incidentally taken notes in this exact way without even realizing it.
The ideal Cornell Note is just one page. The title at the top of the page focuses on an atomic level concept of strong importance for your learning.
The body of the page is split between two areas, a) a space for calling out keywords that link your understanding of this concept to other concepts, and asking questions to further your learning, and b) a general note space that tracks a flow of ideas or different key topics that make up your understanding of the overall concept.
The summary at the bottom of the page, the most important, is where you distill your understanding of the concept into your own words, connect it with your interests and think about how it answers the questions you might have posed. The ideal summary is brief, makes a claim by referring to the evidence AND the keyword list in the notes above, and lends itself well to connecting with other ideas.
Wait a minute… this all sounds familiar. For anyone following the ‘personal knowledge tools’ space, Andy Matuschak’s concept of the ‘evergreen note’ maps very well to the core of what makes Cornell Notes work. The keyword space is practically ‘hyper-linking’ for a paper medium. The title space and summary space is where you make your defensible claims, backed by evidence in your notes. The focus on one-pagers, especially if they’re loose papers, even makes it easy to reorganize and rearrange your notes on the fly, bringing out deeper learning and insights from what you write about.
Cornell Notes in Action
Level 1
So how do we actually get the idea of Cornell Notes running in a digital space like Roam? The short answer is however you would like. While Cornell Notes do have a formal structure, you can easily mimic the idea of each space just by using bullet points and page headers in Roam as follows. This structure (metadata, keywords, body, summary) is easy to setup in a roam/template for instant recreation.
One addition this adds over paper cornell notes is metadata. There’s no set standard for what info you should or shouldn’t keep here. They are all up to preference. For instance, having a separate metadata title different than your page title might give you more room for full titles, whereas your page title might be optimized for searchability. Others, date, source/author, subject, and the like are all possibilities. The important part is to make it what you want!
For some this will be fine, but…
What if we want to go deeper?
Level 2
This is where is gets a little more interesting. We’re going to mimic to exact structure of cornell notes using base Roam features by making use of the sidebar. Instead of having all the sections in a single column, one after the other, we’ll split the notes page into an adjacent related page we can open in the sidebar. Here’s what a finished example looks like for a hypothetical lecture.
The way you mimic this is by splitting every Cornell note page in two, one main page and one notes page, titled [[C: topic]] & [[C: topic, notes]] so they always appear together. The notes page become a link that you shift-click to open in the sidebar, while the main page stays open for your keywords and questions and your final summary at the end.
The keyword section is easy to follow using Roam’s built-in table feature. You can split into two columns or keep it as a single column. You might notice I didn’t use the keyword space for backlinks. That’s really only because this is an example I spun up for this article (and didn’t want to delete those backlinks 😄), otherwise I’d likely mix actual links with non-linked keywords and questions.
One of Roam’s superpowers is the edit-ability of notes wherever you are accessing them. This means any time you encounter a note, whether in the sidebar, in the linked references page, or even as a citation in-text, you can make global changes to that note and it’s automatically updated wherever it’s referenced. Essentially, we’re taking advantage of this to mimic the two-sided structured format of the classic cornell note.
How to Set it Up
The entire setup is easily configurable as a template. The following gif shows a template setup to follow, and how you would get the note template ready for use.
If you really wanted to make the summary section even more distinct, you could make a separate page for the summary of this note, and view it through the linked references page, but I’m guessing most would find that a bit too cumbersome.
Do I need to make a separate [[title — notes]] page?
Nope! This is just the way that I preferred to set it up personally. As an alternative you could put all your notes into a block (bullet point) on the main page of the cornell notes, and use shift-click to upon that block in the sidebar. Personally I chose to put the ‘notes’ section in a [[linked]] separate page because it fits with my philosophy of how to use pages/blocks/tags, as well as for aesthetic reasons, versus putting the notes section on the same page as a bullet point. But you may find it more helpful to use the bullet method.
There’s a lot of ongoing learning about what goes best into pages and what goes best into blocks (bullet points) in the Roam community. In Roam, Pages, blocks &#tags are all kind of the same thing, but also kind of different.
Using a table vs. simply using large bullet points?
This is up to personal taste. I find the table helpful for making the keywords a visually distinct portion of the pages, and two columns helps it stand out even more. But a simple bullet list would do wonders too.
Why use :: for metadata?
If you look closely, you’ll see my metadata titles have :: following the words. This triggers the metadata as an attribute, an early-stage Roam feature that will likely have more uses in the future. Right now they are basically one extra way of collating data (for instance, clicking authors:: would bring you a node connected to all instances you wrote an author into that attribute in your metadata).
What’s with the C: in the Cornell notes title?
Denotation is everything in Roam, everything is accessible through naming-conventions, links and searches, because text is the key for accessing different sections of your graph. You can use this to your advantage by using unique title characters like this.
Essentially, they are another way to carve out spaces for distinct sets of information, almost like setting up a ‘text harddrive’.
C: is my suggestion for doing this with all your Cornell Notes, so they’re readily accessible as a large group.
What was the template setup again?
Simply follow this structure, and include #roam/templates in the parent block title as shown below and you’ll be able to insert this template anywhere by typing ‘;;’ when you want to setup a new cornell page.
Wrapping Up
I hope you enjoy what this note structure has to offer. The best part isn’t the format or the ease of use, it’s learning the principles behind it and figuring out how YOU want to use those principles. Personally, I don’t directly use this format for all my note-taking, I’ve settled on a variety of other formats for particular use-cases that embody these principles. But I think this is a great example to get started with for learning how to get the most out of Roam, or effective note-taking in general.
So, have you bitten the bullet on note-taking apps yet? Roam Research and others like are just the tool for honing your note-taking skills to stay on top of your goals, tie up loose threads and seal the deal on major phases of your work.
Personally I find note-taking apps like this to be one of the most exciting developments in software and the web.
It’s not just because they’re doing things in new ways, or doing things that haven’t been done before… it’s also because there’s unprecedented need for high-level knowledge processing. This is why apps like Roam Research, Obsidian, & Notion are more than just a go-to’s for academics and knowledge-workers: they’re part of a shift in the evolution of the internet and how information will be used.
To me, Roam Research is all about iteration. I’ve been through OneNote, Evernote and Notion phases. I implemented crazy unwieldy ‘systems’ in each. But even when I wrote 5,000 words in Roam one evening, and started thinking of academic workflows and was convinced it was for me, I waited. I built on my graph patiently and built a *habit* of expression. Slowly, serendipitous moments of creativity and the uniqueness of what Roam offers appeared more and more, like compound interest building up from contributing knowledge.
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Disclaimer: I am not, nor have been affiliated with Roam Research, or any other tool I mention. I simply see value in recommending them to others because I believe they can be immensely useful in people’s lives like they have been in mine.
