Re-wrap Ideas
I once saw someone say to convey ideas rather than quote them. If you understand something, it becomes yours—you can share it in your own terms.
What’s the real value in tracing an idea’s lineage? It feels secondary to the idea itself. Context is like explaining the history of a technology when people mostly care about the technology. Those who want the background are engaging at a different layer.
If readers are anything like me, they prefer fewer links. Articles overloaded with them often point to pages whose main substance is already expressed by the surrounding sentence.
I’ve long felt pulled toward some grand system for storing ideas. Some people capture excerpts obsessively; that makes sense if you care about catalogs of words, but if you care about ideas, excerpts lose too much. I think I’ve settled on this: if an idea is worth keeping, it’s worth re-wrapping in your own form. Make the idea your own.