While you can take notes and create flashcards in RemNote in many different formats, one particular format stands out as particularly effective and unique to RemNote: the Concept/Descriptor Framework (CDF). When using the CDF, you model most of your notes as a series of Concepts (concrete or abstract things) and Descriptors (properties of or questions about the concepts).

The CDF is a particularly good fit for RemNote’s model of your thoughts, and many people have found it to be an easy and highly effective method of learning. If you don’t have a strong preference about how to organize your notes and design your flashcards, consider giving this one a try!

In this article, we’ll explore in detail what Concepts and Descriptors are, as well as why RemNote likes to describe ideas this way.

Take a moment to look around you at some everyday objects. Maybe you see a computer, a phone, a plant, or another person. Undoubtedly you interact with most of these things frequently and understand them well.

Suppose you wanted to describe your Computer to someone who had never seen one. You might start with its main components: Mouse, Keyboard, and Screen. You could explain how you can move the Mouse around to open up a Browser on the Screen, and how you can use the Browser to visit a Website. If you were asked about how heavy your Mouse was, or what color the plant was, you could answer easily.

This intuitive way of thinking about the world suggests a model that we call the Concept-Descriptor Framework.

If we write up the Computer example according to the above principles, we might come up with something like the following:

Notice that Concepts conventionally begin with a capital letter and are rendered in bold, while Descriptors conventionally begin with a lowercase letter and are rendered in italics. Relationships between Concepts are primarily represented with Rem References, which appear in blue.

We can see, then, that the CDF is laid out the same way as your natural thinking and learning process. In each system or topic we want to understand, we go through the same three steps:

In the example above, we used concrete, physical Concepts since they’re more intuitive and universally understood, but the CDF works with abstract concepts as well.

You might wonder why, aside from matching what we believe to be the natural human thinking process, the CDF is a useful way to take notes. It turns out that it's not only convenient but also makes learning easier and more efficient, for a number of reasons.

New, complex ideas are difficult to wrap your head around when you consider them all at once. Research shows that people can only hold a small number of pieces of information in their short-term memories at once. When you're repeatedly having to refresh your memory of fussy details to understand what's going on, other information that you need to understand the idea gets constantly pushed out of your short-term memory, so a full understanding becomes somewhere between difficult and impossible.

If you instead break down the idea into simpler parts and thoroughly learn each part and the relationships of the parts to each other, you'll be able to think about the parts more fluidly and on a higher level when you come back to the larger idea.

The act of splitting up an idea also forces you to understand the idea more deeply than you would if you simply copied and pasted textbook material or wrote down what someone said in a lecture and studied that.

The most effective way to deeply learn and retain information is to regularly test your understanding of a topic using tiny prompts that are quick, easy, and fun to answer. A tool that understands your learning progress, like RemNote, can then show you the details you're struggling with more often, significantly increasing your learning efficiency.

The catch is that traditionally, making effective, tiny prompts can be difficult. But when you break knowledge down into Concepts and Descriptors, the prompts almost write themselves. In fact, RemNote will automatically generate flashcards with such prompts, using the same hierarchical structure as your notes! Here are a few examples:

RemNote automatically schedules these flashcards for review using a near-optimal practice schedule. By continuously testing yourself on what you're learning, you'll prevent yourself from forgetting anything once you've learned it.

Human memory, unlike computer memory, is based entirely on connections between ideas; the only way to retrieve a piece of information is to think of something related to it first. So no matter what you're learning, building connections between related concepts is vital – it's the only way you'll remember anything! You need to build connections between the new concepts you're learning, as well as between new concepts and old concepts you already understand well.

Since we believe notes are easier to use when they mirror the structure of your thoughts, RemNote provides several ways to build connections in your notes, most notably Rem References and Tags. Tags can also be turned into templates, which allow you to define the information you want to learn about all Concepts of a similar type; see Structuring Knowledge with Templates and Slots for details.

When you study flashcards, RemNote can also fine-tune the sequence in which cards are presented for review based on the structure of references between those concepts, to reinforce the relationships between them.

Now that you know how the CDF works and why you’d want to use it, check out Creating Concept/Descriptor Flashcards to learn the details of how to apply it to your notes.