The note and its templates
A written note is the part of the record that is most obviously prose and least obviously an interface artefact. It is nevertheless produced by an interface, and the properties of that interface are legible in the output.
Templates and phrase expansion
Templates and expandable phrases exist for a good reason: much of what is written is genuinely repetitive, and retyping it is waste. What they change is the default. Where the empty document defaults to nothing and requires effort per sentence, the template defaults to a full structure and requires effort to remove anything.
Removal is effortful and slightly risky, so material tends to stay. Over time the average note drifts toward the union of every template that has ever been applied to it, and the specific observation - the reason the note exists - becomes a small proportion of a large document.
Carrying material forward
Copying yesterday's note forward saves a great deal of time and is genuinely useful for material that is stable. Its cost is that the reader cannot easily tell which parts were reconsidered today and which are inherited, and that distinction is often the thing they most need.
Interfaces can help here without prohibiting anything, by marking provenance: showing when a block was last edited rather than last saved, or distinguishing carried text from newly written text visually. The information exists; it is usually discarded at display time.
Length is not thoroughness
A long note looks careful and reads as diligence. It is frequently the opposite: length is what accumulates when nothing is ever removed, and it makes the document harder to use for the person who has to read it next.
The right measure of a note is not how much it contains but how quickly a competent reader can find the thing they came for. By that measure, most documentation tooling is optimised for the writer's speed at the cost of every subsequent reader, and there are many more readers than writers.
Designing for the reader
A few unglamorous changes reliably help. Put the recent and the specific at the top, since readers scan from the top and stop early. Keep a stable section order so that people can learn where to look. Use real headings rather than bolded lines, so the document can be navigated by structure rather than by scrolling.
Hold the measure to something readable: a note rendered edge to edge across a wide monitor is hard to read for the same reason any full-width text is, and the fix is a maximum width rather than a change in font.
The underlying tension
Notes serve several purposes at once - a record of what happened, a communication to the next reader, and an artefact that must satisfy administrative requirements. Those purposes pull in different directions, and no interface resolves that tension by itself.
What an interface can do is stop pretending the tension is absent. Separating the parts of a document written for different audiences, and letting each be read on its own, is more honest than a single continuous text that serves all three badly.