zettel-note
Zettel note
A note in this vault is not a summary of a source — it is one claim you can defend, written in your own words, and wired to its neighbors so the graph thinks for you later. The companion model is reading-with-a-Zettelkasten: you read, you understand, you close the book, and you write the idea as if explaining it to yourself. If you cannot write it without looking, you have not understood it yet.
All mechanics here are fixed by [[conventions|Vault Conventions]] (§3 linking, §4 relationship vocabulary, §5 naming, §6 frontmatter, §7 internal structure). This skill is the discipline that makes a note worth linking. It is the routing target for claims drawn out in [[experiential-kolb-teaching]]: when a learner reconstructs a mechanism, it becomes an evergreen note written this way.
The five rules
1. The title is a declarative claim
The title states something true that the note then defends. Not a topic, not a question, not a noun phrase — a sentence with a verb and a stance.
| Bad title (topic) | Good title (claim) |
|---|---|
| Heritability | Heritability is a property of a population in an environment, not of a trait |
| BLUP | BLUP shrinks each estimate toward the population mean in proportion to how little data supports it |
| Marker density | Adding markers beyond linkage-disequilibrium saturation adds noise, not predictive signal |
The slug is the title slugified: lowercased, spaces to hyphens, apostrophes and punctuation stripped, sentence structure kept (§3, §5). Long slugs are expected and fine. The title matches the note's # H1 and its aliases.