On Writing Field Notes

Does anyone else have the very romantic image from movies of researchers sitting in their tents (or huts) late at night and typing up field notes? The light is dim; there is mosquito netting around the bed; and the ethnographer is wearing all khaki.

Wolfinger's article on fieldnotes was very helpful, though I don't think it said anything really surprising. It was helpful because it provided practical advise about how to "see" the event in writing. The salient and comprehensive approaches would both be useful depending on the context. I am wondering if you'd want to begin with a more comprehensive approach, assuming you're new to the environment, and then use the salient approach more later. I am uncertain which approach, probably salient, would correlate best with the Heath/Street suggestion to keep a dialogic notebook in the field. Salient would offer the most opportunity for reflection in the notebook.

Here are a few phrases and ideas from the text that I want to remember:

'many levels of textualization set off by experience' (Van Maanen on 86)

'A single minute would be more than enough time to produce material to fill pages if I simply gave that minute the opportunity to impress itself upon me' (a student ethnographer on 86)

'Concentrate on the first and last remarks in each conversation' (Bogdan and Taylor on 91)