Rough notes are the holding area of a Strut project. They exist so half-formed material has somewhere to sit that is not your manuscript. A note can be a quotation, an overheard line, a transcribed voice memo, or a question you cannot answer yet. This guide covers how notes are captured, found, and eventually used.
- Capture into rough notes; leave placement decisions until the outline exists.
- Write titles you could search for months later, because titles are what search hits first.
- Clip from Source Reader instead of copying by hand, so the file and page travel with the quotation.
- Record voice memos in segments; free transcription samples must be under 2 MB.
- Delete notes only once their content has landed in the draft or been rejected on purpose.
What a rough note is, and what it is not
A note in Strut has two fields: a title and a body. There are no tags, no folders, and no status flags. Each note belongs to one project and appears in the Rough notes panel of that project, alongside every other fragment you have collected for the same piece.
Notes are deliberately separate from documents. A document is something you intend a reader to see. A note is material you intend yourself to use. Keeping them apart means the draft can stay presentable while the thinking behind it stays messy.
Because notes sit inside the project, they travel with it. Anyone you add as an editor sees the same collection, and the project history records when notes were added and removed. Nothing lives in a personal inbox that only you can reach.
Capture faster than you organise
Press New note and a blank card appears at the top of the grid with the title field already focused. Type into either field and the note saves itself shortly after you stop. That is the entire capture ritual, and it is short on purpose.
Resist the urge to decide where a fragment belongs at the moment you record it. Deciding is slow, and the decision is usually wrong before the outline exists. Write down what was said, who said it, and why you noticed. Placement can wait for the draft.
The one thing worth doing well is the title. Titles are the first thing your eye scans in the grid and the first field searched across your workspace. A title like Funding gap, 2019 to 2023 finds itself later; a title like Notes does not.
The point of a note is not tidiness. It is that the sentence still exists next Tuesday.
Turn a voice memo into a note
At the bottom of the notes panel sits the voice capture block. Start recording uses your microphone directly in the browser, and the button becomes Stop and transcribe while it runs. If the microphone is unavailable, upload an audio file instead. Both routes end in exactly the same place.
Strut AI transcribes the recording faithfully and then adds a short section of writing leads: possible claims, scenes, questions, and places the material might sit in an outline. The transcription and the leads are saved together as a new rough note.
Audio uploads are capped at 20 MB, and on the free plan a transcription sample must be under 2 MB. Long interviews are best handled in segments, which also makes the resulting notes easier to reuse than one enormous block of text.
Clip a source and keep the page number
Notes are also where research lands. Open a file from the Sources panel with Open Source Reader, find the passage you want, and save it as a clip. Strut creates a rough note containing the quotation plus a provenance line naming the source file and, for a PDF, the page.
That provenance line is the reason clipping beats copying by hand. Weeks later, when an editor asks where a figure came from, the answer is already sitting under the quotation, and the original file is still downloadable from the project.
Clips also keep the quotation exact. Retyping introduces small changes in wording that survive into the finished piece and quietly misrepresent what a source said. A saved clip preserves the sentence as you actually read it, which matters most in the passages you are least likely to re-check.
Find a note again
Two searches exist and they do different jobs. Find, in the editor top bar or with Cmd/Ctrl+F, searches the draft in front of you and can replace matches. Workspace search, linked at the bottom of the sidebar, searches across every project you own or have been added to.
Workspace search covers three kinds of material at once: rough notes by title and body, documents by title and content, and imported sources by filename and extracted text. Each result says which of the three it is, so you can tell a quotation from a draft sentence at a glance.
This is why capture quality matters so much. A note whose body reads as discussed cannot be found by any search, because nothing inside it names the subject. Write down the noun you would later type into the search box, and the note becomes reachable from any project in your workspace.
Move a note into the draft
There is no automatic import from notes into documents, and the omission is intentional. You choose the sentence, place it in the manuscript yourself, and shape it to fit what surrounds it. The note stays behind afterwards as the record of where that material originally came from.
For a set of notes that has grown into an argument, the AI panel is useful. Paste or select the assembled material in a document, choose Outline, and Strut AI returns a hierarchy naming the central argument, the supporting points, the evidence gaps, and the unresolved questions.
The Expand operation does the next step: it develops rough material into a coherent section while preserving the claim, the concrete details, and the point of view. Give it a Direction saying what must not change, and check what came back before you keep it.
Prune what has stopped earning its place
Notes accumulate. Delete the ones whose content has reached the draft or been ruled out, using the × on the card. You will be asked to confirm, and the deletion is written into the project history with the note title.
Keep anything you rejected for a reason worth remembering. A note recording why a promising line of argument failed is worth more than a note repeating a point the manuscript already makes three times. Dead ends are expensive to rediscover twice.
When a project ends, read through its notes before deleting the project itself. Anything that will matter to a future piece needs to be recreated as a note in that future project, because deleting a project removes every note inside it along with everything else.
The same observation, captured two ways
A note titled Interview, with the body reading: good stuff about the delays, check later.
A note titled Site manager on the 2023 permit delays, with the body: “We lost eleven weeks waiting on a signature nobody could name.” Said in the second interview, about the eastern site. Use to open the middle section, if the eleven weeks can be verified.
The second note survives contact with a search box, tells you what to do with it, and admits what still needs checking. It took about twenty seconds longer to write.
Common mistakes
| The mistake | Why it costs you, and what to do instead |
|---|---|
| Using notes as a second draft | Long polished passages hidden in the notes panel do not benefit from the outline, the word goal, version history, or export. Once material has become prose, move it into a document and let the note keep only its source trail. |
| Capturing without provenance | A quotation with no origin becomes unusable the moment anyone questions it. Clip from Source Reader, or type the source into the note body yourself, at the moment of capture rather than later. |
| Titling every note Untitled note | The default title is a placeholder, not a name. Untitled cards are invisible to workspace search and indistinguishable in the grid, which means the material inside them is effectively lost. |
| Recording an hour of audio in one go | Uploads over 20 MB are refused, and a single enormous transcription is hard to reuse. Record in topic-sized segments so each transcription becomes a note you can act on. |
Your checklist
- Open Rough notes and press New note the moment the material arrives.
- Give the note a title containing the words you would search for later.
- Add the source, the speaker, or the date in the body before you move on.
- Clip quotations through Source Reader so the file and page number are attached.
- Run Outline over assembled notes when they start to resemble an argument.
- Delete notes whose content has reached the manuscript, and keep the ones that record a decision.
Key terms
- Clip
- A passage saved out of Source Reader. It becomes a rough note carrying the quotation plus a line naming the source file and, for a PDF, the page it came from.
- Writing leads
- The short list of possible claims, scenes, questions, and outline placements that Strut AI appends beneath a voice-note transcription, so a recording arrives with suggestions already attached.
- Workspace search
- The search page linked from the sidebar. It looks through note titles and bodies, document titles and contents, and source filenames and extracted text.
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Frequently asked questions
Are there limits on how many notes I can keep?
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No. The free plan limits you to three projects, but notes inside a project are unlimited, as are documents and saved versions. A single note body can hold a substantial amount of text, which is enough for a full interview transcription.
Do rough notes get sent to Strut AI automatically?
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No. Operations run on the passage you have selected in the editor, or the whole document if nothing is selected. Note content reaches the AI only when you place it in a document or ask a question about an imported source.
Can a collaborator edit my notes?
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Someone you add as an editor can create, change, and delete notes in that project, exactly as you can. Someone added as a reviewer has read access and can leave comments on documents instead. Either way, the resulting activity appears in the project history with a name and a timestamp attached.
Where do voice transcriptions go?
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Into the Rough notes panel of the current project, saved as a new note together with the writing leads Strut AI suggests underneath. The status line reports progress while the job runs, and reloading the notes panel afterwards shows the finished card sitting with the rest of your material.
Can I search notes across all my projects at once?
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Yes. Workspace search, linked from the bottom of the sidebar, covers every project you own and every project shared with you, returning notes, documents, and sources together in one list. Each result is labelled with its type and links straight back to the project it belongs to.
What happens to a clip if I remove the source file?
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The note and its quotation stay in the project, because the clip holds a copy of the text rather than a pointer into the file. The original document is deleted from storage though, so download anything you might need to re-check before you remove a source.