Review workspace
How to Organize Reading Notes You Will Actually Reuse
Capture passages with their context, separate quotation from commentary, and keep everything findable months later.
Start from the work, not from a blank page
In the Review workspace every note belongs to a specific work created by someone else. Add the work first — title, creator, category and status — so each note you make afterwards inherits its context instead of floating in a general notes file.
Choosing Fiction, Nonfiction or Scholarly at this point matters, because the category decides which analysis pages the notebook offers you later.
Keep the queue and the library separate
My Literature holds everything you have recorded, filtered by category and status. The Reading Queue is the shorter, ordered list of what comes next. Keeping them apart stops the intention list from swallowing the record of what you have actually read.
Capture highlights with their location and your own note
A quotation with no page reference and no reason for saving it is dead weight. When you save a highlight, record the location, pick a category for it, and write the sentence explaining why it matters. That one sentence is what makes the passage usable when you return to it.
- Quote exactly, and keep the excerpt short enough to be a genuine quotation.
- Say what the passage does — establishes a claim, contradicts an earlier one, shows a technique.
- Add the concept or theme it belongs to so related passages gather together.
Move commentary onto the analysis pages
Highlights are evidence; analysis is where you argue. Each work gets analysis pages matched to its category, split into core pages worth completing and optional pages you can mark not applicable. Answer the core pages as you read rather than saving them for a final push.
Log sessions, then close the loop
Reading sessions record what you covered and when, which makes a long book feel like progress instead of guesswork. When you finish, archive the work: it leaves your active library and frees a slot on the free plan without deleting a single note.
Export the notebook as Markdown whenever you need it outside the app — for a seminar handout, a citation pass, or your own backup.
Try it in your own notebook
The Notebook plan is free forever and includes both the Review and Write workspaces across Fiction, Nonfiction and Scholarly. Prefer to look before you sign up? The sample notebook is read-only demonstration content — no account, nothing saved.