Field Book

A friend of mine wanted to know how I was taught to layout a field book. It's a simple process by which you can use almost any notebook for most forms of field research. I learned this technique when I was in Archaeological Field School at Ohio University almost a decade ago. You could use this format for:

1. Journaling
2. Writing (character /scene development)
3. Class Notes
4. Field Research

All you'll need is a lined notebook (or graph), some colored pencils and a ruler.

I always stuck the ruler in the back of the notebook because I had to lay out a grid in the notebook in case we found something on the site.

1. Lay the ruler against the outside edge of the notebook and draw a red line down page. For sake of ease, I would just draw the line the width of the ruler since it was usually plenty of space for what I needed in the margins.

2. In the margin that you've created, you can record whatever headings you need to outline the entry. When I was doing archeology, we had to record the date, what plot we were on, what level, etc. If you were using it for class notes or story ideas, then you can change the headings as you see fit.

3. Alternate the colors of pencil you use for the various functions in the layout. I usually used a blue pencil to divide one entry from the next as it was a good visual cue. The body of the text was written however you wanted it to be and along the margin I would list any buzzwords that I knew were important from the entry. This could be anything from a "buzzword" in a conversation, a vocab word from a class' lecture, or something that you would need to easily reference.


I would circle the buzzword in the margin and point to the entry that spoke of it. Usually this was done in green.

4. Anything that was a follow-up to what you were writing about, a to-do, was added and marked with a yellow pencil.

Since it was troublesome to carry a lot of colored pencils with me in the notebook and a bit too complicated to use them while entering the data in the field they were usually used when I got home as a follow-up.

I would usually mark out the margins of a few pages in advance of where I was in the notebook so that I had plenty of room to write. Inside the book itself I would stash a green pencil since that was the color I used to mark anything important on the page.

You could easily substitute the use of colored pencils for high-liters if that's what you like