The dynamism of the note, tonal dynamics, and the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks
- When I look through my notes, I inevitably find all three spaces: from the factual to the “beyond”—the gut-level Chuika. Moving from one space to another and back again creates not only balance but a kind of dynamic motion. In my opinion, this is the mark of a creative note-maker: someone who not only knows how to keep the single most important reader engaged with what he has to say, but also how he says it.
- In Ancient Greece this was simply called rhetoric and dialectic. I’d like to remind myself, and any reader, of what many note-takers fall prey to and what I firmly believe at heart: they pay too much attention to clever words and well-crafted sentences. Eventually this attention transforms into the desire to be interesting, without realizing that the reader becomes hooked only when he arrives at the Chuika place in the note, then moves backward slightly to the analytical layer, then to the factual, and then again back to Chuika.
- Tonal shifts are integral to what Greeks and Romans considered rhetorics and dialectics. Plato listed both as prime components of good writing and good speaking. In his opinion, they had been the golden standard of oratory from antiquity through modern times.
- But as in every age, ours included, we tend to forget these principles. And when we do, writing and notes become simplified in all the wrong ways.
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