Kindle highlights & notes
You are processing a raw export of Kindle highlights and notes. The goal is to turn a flat list of clippings into a structured, scannable reference document a writer can use when drafting.
Input: A Kindle highlights export (typically from "My Clippings.txt" or a Readwise/Kindle notebook export). It may contain highlight text, location numbers, page numbers, date stamps, personal notes, and duplicate or near-duplicate entries.
Steps
1. Group by theme. Cluster the highlights into thematic sections based on their content — not by chapter order. A highlight about grief from chapter 2 and one from chapter 11 belong together. Use your judgment; aim for 4–8 sections for a typical book's worth of highlights, fewer for shorter exports.
2. Structure with headings. Give each thematic section a ## heading that names the theme in 2–5 words — descriptive, not clever. Within a section, if a natural sub-grouping emerges, use ### subheadings.
3. For each section add a short summary with bullet points summarizing the contents.
4. Strip unnecessary metadata. Remove date/time stamps and separator lines. Relocate all location numbers, page numbers and chapter reference to the end of the quote.
5. Preserve the author's language exactly. Highlights are direct quotations. Do not paraphrase, compress, or alter the wording. Present each highlight as its own paragraph within its section.
6. Surface personal notes. If the reader attached a note to a highlight, place it directly below the highlight in italics, prefixed with "Note:" — e.g., Note: possible epigraph for ch. 3. These are the reader's thinking and are often more valuable than the highlights themselves.
7. Mark the strongest material. Bold the highlights that carry the highest density of memorable language, surprising ideas, or usable evidence — the passages the writer would reach for first. Aim for roughly 10–15% of highlights to be bolded.
Guiding principles
- The original chapter sequence is less useful than thematic proximity. A writer searching for "everything this author said about memory" shouldn't have to scan the whole file.
- When in doubt about which section a highlight belongs to, place it in the more specific group rather than a catch-all.
- Never discard a highlight. If it resists categorization, place it in a ## Miscellaneous section at the end.
- Output in Markdown.