Products of thinking, at least in our culture, may be linear, but the thinking, the working out of one's understanding, is necessarily recursive, dialectical and dialogic. It involves the making of tentative formulations, experiencing the inadequacy of these formulations, and reformulating, over and over again. Ordinary notebooks and file card systems are linear recording devices and do not provide a way for this re-thinking to proceed.

This is a design for a re-thinking notebook that includes room for at least four kinds of dialectic: 1) the recursive process of observation and response to observation; 2) the dialectic between formulation and question; 3) dialogue between yourself and other people; 4) and the temporal dialectic between what you are thinking now, and what you may be thinking later.

This sounds quite complicated and it certainly would be if we tried to do it all at once. This four-column notebook allows us to do one part at a time and holds the other parts of the process in the form of blank space.

Observation & Response		Need-to-know Questions		Dialogue with Another Person		Later Reflections
		. . . . . . ..Spiral	.	. . . . . . Binding

Lay out a few pages of your notebook like this and begin working in the first column. If you are reading something, make your observations in the form of quotations. Write out in full the words or sentences you are responding to and then write your response, so that when you come back and read it later it will read like a conversation between you and the text you are reading. (Do not take the obvious shortcut of writing down only a few words of the passage you are quoting on the idea that you can come back to the text and find it later. It is important to juxtapose your words and the words of the text on the same page, both for your thinking process now, and for your re-thinking later.)

Include everything you can in your responses: feelings, arguments, ideas, disagreements, problems, ambiguities, conclusions, questions, uncertainties, images, and even irrelevant memories or fantasies that pop into your mind as you read. All of this is part of your thinking.

Later, go back and reread what you have written and work on writing questions and things you need or would like to know in the second column. Sometimes these further questions have to be worked up from vague uncertainties. "I wonder if this is really. . .?" or "Somehow this doesn't seem quite right. . . ." Do this work in the second column and try to have each entry in that column end with a question for further inquiry.

When you are aware of wanting someone else's opinion write a note to that effect in the third column. When you write in someone else's notebook, write in the third column. Save the fourth column for later.

At the beginning your notebook will be mainly blank space. That is good as it leaves room for further thinking. You may be surprised to find that eventually those pages will fill up. Some people even tape additional sheets on the right hand edge when they need more space.