Writing in this form is a merciless way to spot the holes — the quiet disconnections in your understanding. You can nod along to an idea in your head and feel that you grasp it; the moment you try to set it down in full sentences, every gap announces itself. Serious note-takers call these permanent notes: notes meant to last, written to stand on their own.
The process should feel effortful, and at the same time playful. Effortful, because you are deliberately filling gaps and forging meaningful connections to your existing ideas and mental models — real cognitive work that resists being rushed. Playful, because in the very act of doing it you stumble onto insights you did not know you had; the connections you forge end up teaching you something.
The objective is that your future self can read these notes back and still comprehend them — without finding them banal or empty. If a note fails that bar, it is a sign your threshold for concretizing the idea was set too low to ever really comprehend the subject. A note that reads as obvious later usually means the thought was never pinned down in the first place. That is why writing to understand should equal writing to transfer — whether the recipient is your future self or someone else entirely.
This kind of writing also has a mutual relationship with reading with intention. “To write” gives a purpose to “to read”: knowing you intend to write something down changes how attentively, and how hungrily, you read in the first place. (A practice I keep returning to in a note from a friend.)