“Grid topic” is a term I made up to better elaborate my question. Imagine there are a group of note fragments forming a grid or a table. Each cell itself is too fragmented to stand by its own, but the whole table is too large to fit into a single atomic note. However, each row and each column of the table can be organized into a meaningful note with a reasonable length.
Here is a more personal and concrete example.
I‘m learning German now, and a basic rule of most languages is about how to place verbs in a sentence. In German, verb placement depends on several things: whether the sentence is a statement or a question, and whether modal verbs are involved. And we get something like this:
| | Statement | Question |
| No modal verb | Rule 1 | Rule 2 |
| Modal verb | Rule 3 | Rule 4 |
And what I really want is to organize each row and column into a single note, so this is what I did:
- First, I created 4 notes, each dedicated to a single rule, and tagged each rule #fragment (a tag indicating the note is not self-containing). These notes would not be linked to by any notes except those created in Step 2 & 3.
- Then, I created 4 notes, each dedicated to a single conceptual row or column, and embedded fragments into these notes accordingly. These notes are what I reference most in other notes. For instance, if I create a note for modal verbs, I would include a link pointing to the note of “Rule 3 & 4”.
- Later, I created an index note to collect links to each notes in Step 1 and 2, which is for organization purpose only.
What would you do?