I was enthusiastic when I heard about the new student-run journal, Notes. Released fortnightly with a smart website and Kindle edition, I thought, "Hurrah! A proper publication for creative writing that doesn’t look as if it’s going to flounder as soon as the editors graduate." A joint Oxford and Cambridge venture including work from further afield (this third issue includes work from writers in Durham, Leeds and Harvard), Notes features more than just creative writing. Short stories and poems are placed among essays about art, psychology, film, gender studies, artwork and what looks like a political manifesto.

Some of the highlights of this issue include Rowan Evans’ delicate poem ‘returnsong’, with its neat rhymes ‘wing’, ‘sing’, ‘ling’ skating across the page, and an engaging piece by Louis Geary arguing for the benefits of the one-word essay in ‘LOL’. There is also a stylish piece by Jeremy Wikeley on the revolutionary politics of the new Batman film, and another poem, ‘Fast, Number One’ by Jon Sanders, with some wonderfully virtuosic wordplay on ‘fasting’. I like that the Notes editors are omnivorous: what’s being valued is the sheer stuff of debate, dialogue, exchange of thought, words, words, words, notes…

The lack of pretension is refreshing: it’s not a magazine with a specific ideological standpoint trying to change the way you think; it simply aims to provide a platform for sharing ideas. This is fantastic, but I wonder if the mongrel-like quality of Notes might have a potentially negative effect on the most important thing of all: getting these ideas to its readers. This is mostly a question of presentation, which will evolve with future issues, but I was a little daunted on picking up this photocopied sheaf filled with dense paragraphs: I hardly knew where to start.

Text fills the pages with pieces placed in an apparently random order, often clustered together on the same page, without denoting the difference between an article and a story or which university the writers are from. I liked the use of artwork, particularly what looks like a reproduction of a woodcut by Will Thomson, ‘Book 1A’, but the dark photographs of roofs and rainy streets photocopied in black and white felt like filler and added nothing but needless gloom.

It’s cool to be minimal and not too consciously ‘arty’. However, at the moment, Notes just looks a bit boring. Student publications don’t need to be flashy, but they do need to engage. Notes is full of diverse and interesting things, but it needs to make sure it looks like knowledge, and not just information. If you want to spread enthusiasm for creative thought, you need to help the reader get excited, too.