My history professor handed back my primary source response last week, and the comment wasn’t about my argument. It was about the annotations stapled to the back, she’d circled almost every line and written “pick one sentence per document, not the whole page.”
I’d been copying out long passages from each letter because I didn’t trust myself to remember what mattered later, so my notes ended up almost as long as the source itself, which kind of defeats the point of taking notes at all.
She said over-copying usually means you haven’t decided yet what the source is for, and once you force yourself to pick just one line, the reason you picked it tells you what you actually think.
I tried it on the next assignment, picking one sentence made me explain why it mattered instead of restating what was there, and the response came out shorter and clearer without really trying.
Made me look sideways at the notes I keep for my skin doctor visits too, pages of every little thing that I never fully use once I’m in the chair. Same fix probably applies, pick the one line that actually changed.