I once believed this since there were so many articles written over and over about it over the years. Religiously refused type notes. Handwriting only. Carried notebooks everywhere, the only person in a meeting handwriting notes.
Could never find anything again long after I wrote it, or took way too long to look it up. Idiotically transcribing my notes into emails to send off as meeting notes.
Switched to typing everything, even stream-of-consciousness stuff for myself, a couple years ago and would never want to go back. Feel quite foolish for falling for this for so long.
I've never heard anyone suggest you should only hand write. I type most of the time, but use handwriting whenever I need to learn something or absorb a lot of information at once. It's not an effective filing/information retrieval system, it's an effective brain training system.
Exactly. I use digital to keep notes (e.g. meeting minutes) which I need to refer to and lookup regularly.
I use a notebook to write stuff down while studying. I don't always refer back to them. Especially not after I've finished studying the topic but the process ingrains the ideas into my head in a way that typing can't. I also draw diagrams and things to illustrate ideas which further help retention.
Ditto. Some notes are evergreen though. I still have the single page of notes I made during your session on building web apps. Specifically, the dev setup necessary to stand up "Something that will last on the public Internet".
And --- you can't make this s*#% up --- that was twelve years to the day (I just checked); 14 Feb 2012.
As it turns out, that page is still entirely relevant, and I'm still working on it. [Insert :sweat-smile: emoji].
Back to hand writing; Too late in life I realised its value. I spent all my school and college life absolutely hating it --- writing was too hard.
Now I use it when I really need to pay attention to detail. It compels me to slow down and that is how I absorb material better. Further, I realized it is most useful when I am reading / thinking on my own, whereas live classroom note-taking disconnects me from the topic. So now I just listen through live lectures and only jot down keywords at points of confusion and/or insight.
This applies to code too. From time to time, for difficult topics, I will hand-copy code from textbook examples, and also hand-evaluate them on paper before typing the thing into the computer to see if it works. Even if I am following along by typing directly in my Emacs, I always type out any demo / sample code; never copy-pasting. Some of the mechanics remain the same; i.e. slow down, breathe, and pay attention to detail.
Absolutely this "it's an effective brain training system."
Apart from helping with faster memorisation, I have noticed that writing a problem down / solving on paper improves problem solving significantly. I always diagram out the problem & solution on paper whenever i get stuck.
part of the reason for me is that there's less friction to transition from writing to doodling random stuff while thinking about things and going back.
compare writing to typing in a computer, if while typing you start to visualize the concepts/topics and want to do some small doodles while thinking you're kinda out of luck, even if you have a tablet there's still friction and you having to have what's written and what's doodled in separate files.
tablets screen texture still feels less comfortable than plain paper and a ballpoint pen, that why I always have one on my desk.
I almost never return back to my handwritten notes.
I started using a notepad app on my phone a few months ago. I was quite surprised that they supported images and doodling right there in the middle of text. Felt like this could finally compete with pen & paper.
The lesson I've taken from learning drawing is that the observation accomplished by slowing down is different from the one made when you speed up. If you read, for example, Kimon Nicolaides, who was writing before any of the modern research on handwritten vs typed, he encourages students to progress to slower and slower contour drawings(outlines drawn without looking at your paper). The reason to use this approach is because it makes drawing more linguistic in nature: you "read" the line and instruct your hand to move slightly in a direction. You can't look back and check, so you have to know by feel how much you moved. Repeating this makes you extremely aware of tiny differences between lines, so you end up with good control over proportions as a result. Of course, you could get around this study and use a method like tracing, and get a very detailed outline. But then you wouldn't develop any awareness of what you're looking at.
So when you go slow and engage more senses and muscles, you aren't taking "better notes", you're making your brain linger on the content longer and in more depth. It's borderline useless if it's a business meeting that you're notetaking, but it's also potentially very helpful for developing the language of shapes and lines, math symbols, molecular diagrams, etc. A lot of study recommendations now say, "take the notes twice". Once in lecture, just letting your hand move without understanding and reducing anything that's lengthy and repetitive to a shorthand symbol. And then a second time when you are at home, allowing yourself to go slowly and develop more comprehension as a mode of study.
That! I would argue this can be generalized into other fields, to everything related to the attention span.
It probably boils down to actually giving a thought, consciously or not, to the new information: be it in a conversation with a person, when learning something new at school or at work, or in a work meeting making important decisions. Almost impossible if you only rush all the time, or if you are overloaded with the influx of the information.
I did sort of the opposite. Used to do all typed, now I do both. I make a distinction between notes, which are ephemeral and for memory and quick reminders, and documentation, which is for long term reference. Notes are on paper, documentation is on my computer. I find it's actually a really helpful distinction to make at time of recording.
Same. For years I did everything digitally. I didn't do anything handwritten. The only exception was to put my handwritten signature on some document. That's the only handwritten thing I did for literal years, if not a decade.
What made me change my mind was (1) noticing that my digital notes were usually buried under several layers of backups of tarballs of backups of tarballs of backups so it was getting inconvenient because I have multiple devices and don't want to set up sync for reasons.
And then (2) there was this notebook from fscking high school that has somehow survived everything I've been through up until now, mocking me with all its perfectly preserved information that has lived more than my oldest device. Not useful information, mind you. But just the fact that it's still there, conveniently at hand, accessible in less time than it would take me to search my unorganized mess of backups.
Something clicked in me around last year, and realized that I could use notebooks for small things that I might want to reference in the future. Like some useful commands, ideas for things to improve, and small things like that.
So now I treat notes on my phone and computer as ephemeral, even if they might still exist in a nested backup somewhere.
Haven't regretted it so far.
Yes, I could improve how I organize my backups, but I won't. For reasons that I'm fully aware don't make sense to others. It basically boils down to (1) it's a back up, touch it as little as possible; and (2) whenever I change devices (e.g. because hardware upgrades), I usually want to start afresh because I no longer like the old way I organized things, while I also don't want to bring my old notes and re-organize them in the new way I like now.
But only loose-leaf notebooks work for me. I can't use more "permanent" notebooks because I still want to be able to move stuff around somewhat.
Adjacent, but I found my journal writing really took off after I switched to typing it. My handwriting was never really able to keep up with my brain, and typing allows me to rethink ideas and how I want to write them.
> My handwriting was never really able to keep up with my brain
I found value in hand-writing by doing morning-pages as a regular high volume stream-of-conscious practice which allowed my hand-writing to free itself from the deliberate part of my mind.
The mind should be alive while you hand-write rather than, as a imagine it, a child spelling out the letters as they print them. Ideally it should be more of a flow state with multiple parts of your mind working in parallel. You can basically queue up a sentence for the more autonomous part of the brain to hand-write while the rest of your mind is thinking more strategically and refining arguments.
For me, hand-writing can be magical because that semi-conscious autonomous part can be a source of creativity of it's own. The conscious mind has ordered a vanilla statement but the hand has embellished it with unplanned rhetorical flourish which can take the observing part of the mind by surprise by it's beauty.
This can feel like a bit of dialogue between parts of my mind as I write. The planning part is reading what is emerging from the hand and getting inspired beyond it's own plans. I'd be curious if this has any genuine physiological basis with multiple parts of the brain because it does fit into those right-brain / left-brain type models.
I go in cycles and start assuming I'm getting the same benefit with typing but I then rediscover how the craft of hand-writing opens up something fresh I've been missing. There is something to the constant forward progression, the uneditable ink and the physical movement that helps. The way words appear is allowing for creative supervention. There is something about how ink on a page materially changes the world but letters on a screen are intangible vapour. For me typing, can always feel a little unserious and uncommitted. No matter how I might try to set my mind, there is a temptation to edit after every keystroke.
I think it's related to how some people can speak with simplicity and grace but they write turgid crap. Whatever that natural off-the-top-of-your-mind circuit we use to speak can become overpowered by an overthinking inner bore. For me at least, hand-writing can activate some different brain areas and find some freedom.
Same. I also do audio journals, and I find that each type seems better suited to sorting different kinds of problems. Usually if I need to figure out many details, or something that has an enumeration or sequence, writing is better (and digital so I can rearrange it).
If it's about trying to understand what's bothering me on a subject, audio journal ("talking it out") seems to work better, though writing also works.
Sometimes I'll be surprised when I see or hear my thoughts laid out like that. Often I've thought something for a long time and never realized it explicitly.
Typed notes have never worked for me. In university I used a Surface Pro to take notes with OneNote, which worked decently well - and I could link other resources, search, etc. These days I just use a regular notebook. I've been tempted by eink tablets like Remarkable and Supernote, but haven't really convinced myself it's worthwhile.
Yes - it is true that I sometimes have to thumb through a couple different notebooks to find what I'm looking for, but most of the time it's only my current and maybe last notebook I need to reference.
My issue in college was that my handwriting was garbage when I tried to write quickly, like one would do while taking notes during a lecture. If I zoomed in all the way on One Note on my Surface Pro, the lines of the pencil tool would be heavily smoothed and actually legible. I could also go back during downtime and rearrange text and diagrams, rewrite mistakes cleanly, and erase doodles (or move them).
Suddenly I went from taking horrific notes to taking absolutely amazing notes that I could actually use later. I believe that this contributed a decent amount to my success later on in college.
I don't mean this as a criticism but I think a lot of the perceived benefits from handwriting are precisely from the overhead of needing to be organized about it. Just jotting it down by hand is not the source of the benefit, but of the resistance that forces you to grow abilities to overcome it.
> Just jotting it down by hand is not the source of the benefit
That's not what most of the studies I've seen say. I can't remember the specifics (since I didn't write them down by hand) but IIRC the differentiating factor was whether you hand wrote your notes, not how you organized them. In other words the literal act of jotting it down is the source of the benefit.
That said, these psychology studies are pretty useless most of the time.
That's my point. That's why I think it's confusing. You could go to an elite gymnasium and think that training lots of hours is all you need, but everyday orders of magnitude more people put in a whole lot of hours and never get anywhere near elite level performance.
In other words, I think there's a strong selection bias at play here. Meta analysis would shed light there but I am satisfied with my note management so I don't really wanna put any effort into that.
My experience is the same but opposite. I have probably 200 notebooks filled that I never needed to reference because writing them by hand made me memorize their contents. I could never replicate the phenomenon with typing.
I find paper to be the best way to keep track of checklists and information that I'm actively working on, or long term continuous work. Digital is best for information I'll need to search through quickly or access large amounts of at any time.
Sketching out ideas for something I'll build over the weekend: paper.
A list of things I need to get done and chip away at over the next 2 months: paper.
A complicated web of info that I might need just a part of at some indeterminate point in the future: digital.
This mirrors my experience, except I went through a whole additional phase in-between where I tried digital inking thinking it would bridge the gap... only to find it was the worst of both worlds.
Insufficient canvas on a digital screen, lack of immediate access that flipping pages has, and poor handwriting recognition.
Wish I could get all the wasted hours back that I spent correcting bad OCR.
I have this same issue. I just wanted to be able to put my thoughts to paper. Especially ToDo notes when the boss is verbally listing out everything they want you to do off the top of there head. I could never keep up or transcribe but I've found more of a balance since I've started practicing shorthand stenography.
Stenography or gregg shorthand can have you hand writing at 60-80 WPM depending on how good you are. While I'm not that fast yet I am to the point we're I can grab some conversations entirely on paper and nothing gets by me anymore. It used to be a industry standard to learn if you were a reporter before hand held recording devices entered the picture and it was taught at nearly all schools across America. Why we quit teaching this as a country I will never know.
I am trying to learn typing stenography as well but the learning curve is a bit more steep for me.
Yay for shorthand. I learned Orthic. Taking notes with pen and paper is now more convenient than taping them into a phone: speed about the same, but you only need one hand, and it's more comfortable.
I’ve found it’s definitely the case, though memory is neither perfect nor infinite.
A couple of years ago I switched to ipad and apple pencil. The key is that the ipad indexes the handwritten text.
It’s nowhere near as nice as pen and paper (and I’m no snob — mechanically it’s not great). I added a screen cover to increase friction and practiced a little. Works pretty well and I have all my notes with me.
I'm more of a visual person. I usually "draw" my notes to make things easier to understand. When I need to revisit it, remembering how things relate to each other, I find it easier to picture what I drew, "retrace" my thought process, and recall relationships.
Everything else like recipe, TODO list, I just type it directly into my phone/tablet.
Yes, I just can't believe in this handwriting good - typing bad idea. For what it's worth, I can't handwrite fast enough to follow my thoughts, and therefore I make errors. Typing gives me no such problems.
But the other thing is - as soon as I start (or started, back when I was a pupil/student) taking notes, I stop learning. Everybody always insisted that "you have to take notes!", so I tried that sometimes - and it was a disaster. Didn't learn. Had to go over the notes and trying to learn from that. Not good at all.
When I didn't take notes I could focus 100% on what was shown and said, and I learned it. I understood it, to the extent that there was nothing to remember (just like you don't have to remember that an apple will fall, if given the chance). So, when class was over, I understood. Easy on the brain.
Obviously there are equations and pure facts. Those you should simply look up when needed. That's how we were thought in my college anyway - learn how to find what you need, when you need it.
For other things - not attending classes I mean - I most definitely prefer using a keyboard (designs, thoughts about designs etc). Handwriting would be the worst for this.
TL;DR - my own experience absolutely tells me that typing is at least as good, probably much better, than handwriting, and it's all a red herring anyway because taking notes is detrimental to deep understanding. Keep that to the absolute minimum, and it can be useful, but only then. And for that, it makes no difference what writing method you use.
> Obviously there are equations and pure facts. Those you should simply look up when needed.
In math, at least, part of the difficulty of higher level problem solving is that you simply need to have a large number of definitions and theorems memorised to be able to do anything interesting or difficult. And you need to have seen (and remember!) examples of things. This lets you reach a higher level of thinking where your intuition about what is and isn't true is much better.
"Look at up when you need it" doesn't work if you don't know what you need.
Typing out math doesn't really get my juices flowing. I freely admit I have no real evidence for this.
+1. I used to be a big fan of bullet journal and keep all my todo list / planning in my notebook. Sometimes I'm not sure if this really has more practical value or it just makes me FEEL better.
But now I'm close to 100% on note taking apps like bear or ios default notes.
In the heyday of handwritten notes it wasn't so different from how we organize files on computers today. After all where do we think those common fields came from? Timestamps, data blocks, pages, tags/keywords, etc.
Notes are front-to-back and empty space on pages is minimal (especially pocket notebooks). Regions of the pages are broken into numbered blocks. Index is written back-to-front with each entry containing at least a timestamp and block number. Keywords, if you can fit them, greatly enhances searchability.
I'd love to know of any books written about this topic.
A regular topic-to-page-number index has served for about 1500 pages of work notes since ~2018, but my personal journal's quite a bit longer and I lacked the foresight to index that from the start. It's not that I mind an excuse to reread in detail, but I'd like to begin as I mean to go on and I just haven't come up with a way to do it that looks maintainable.
My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
I don't group anything when I'm writing and just stick to a more or less consistent set of general keywords per entry. Each index entry is its own numbered row. Index entries may need their own numbers so I can come back later to group. I may not even index if I'm really rushed until later as long as I mark my regions I can index it all later. Not hard to count them up.
An example of an index entry:
"56 2024-02-13@22:30 39.1 hn"
where the format is: "<index entry #> <timestamp> <page #>.<region #> <keyword>"
I would have to linearly search if I haven't yet updated my groups in a meta index that spans notebooks e.g. "showerthoughts: 3.30.3 9.42.1 10.3.2 ... " where the format is <book #>.<page #>.<region #> or more concisely <book #>.<index #> I've done both before. I prefer the latter when my index has lots of columns that are more helpful (such as bigger notebooks and I always label my columns so I don't confuse myself because not all my notebooks are the same format depending on size).
There's always time for indexing and metaindexing later and I find it relaxing. Sort of like washing the dishes. It's a discipline thing, but doesn't have to be perfect. If I had a bunch of old unindexed books I'd start by just broadly labeling the books first (mostly/all school, mostly/all work, mostly/all personal, etc.) and then lazily drill down into pages and regions and keywords as I actually need the info. Just as long as I didn't waste the effort I took to find things the hard way and be sure to index it's better than no index at all... wabi-sabi and all that.
Also worth pointing out I don't have separate books for topics. Fuck that it's going on whatever paper I've got on hand and I've even stuck loose pages into books later. As long as the actual content has matching numbers on it (in the corner) the index will keep track. I number it according to where I'm gonna stick it or just n+1 non-loose soon-to-no-longer-be-blank pages/regions. I truly treat paper like disk space and write whatever whenever. It really freed me to think that way. If the index is lost it's not unrecoverable either, just tedious.
Pretty sure I picked up the habit of decimal numbering in like the 3rd grade. I had teachers whose assignments were like that: <assignment #>.<problem #>
i.e. "Did you turn in homework 5.1 through 7.15? No?! You're going to the office if you can't sit in the hall to finish it by the end of class!" Thought all teachers were like that.
> My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
A master of understatement! But this is an impressively well developed scheme, and if I take nothing else away from it I suspect the idea of metaindexing will prove useful. Thanks for taking the time to go into such detail!
They didn’t test learning at all; they tested writing a word or typing a word based on a Pictionary prompt.
I’m not a research scientist, but it seems like you could look at this evidence and just as easily conclude that writing by hand increases the extraneous load for learners, i.e. that the task of writing itself requires more attention or “mental bandwidth” which would be diverted away from whatever you’re hoping they will learn.
I’d like to know if there’s evidence against this alternative explanation.
As someone who swears by handwriting, has owned a tablet for 20 years, and takes all meeting notes by hand, I think you make an excellent point: These ECG readings could mean many things. We still don’t have a good understanding of how the brain encodes information and stores it for long term retrieval. Assuming this study is methodologically sound, I think it’s a worthy research finding. However, the authors suggesting handwriting is superior to typing for learning is a speculative leap.
In this study they observed specific patterns that previously were attributed to learning and remembering.
> "The present findings suggest that the intricate and precisely controlled handwriting movements have a beneficial impact on the brain’s connectivity patterns related to learning and remembering."
But you are right, they do not directly _prove_ that handwriting yields a greater learning effect.
I wonder about the skill level of the writer/typist.
"Forty university students in their early twenties"
Most older people learned to write and only learned to type when access to typewriters and computers became common.
But these forty 20-year-olds? They were probably using keyboards since the beginning, and may have written maybe in grade school or for a signature.
Fluency using a keyboard can be quite easy on the brain. I've been typing a long time and I don't even think of the spelling or word, it just comes out on the screen. In fact, I have forgotten logins and passwords, but my fingers will dutifully type them anyway.
I can also write, but I gave it for keyboards, and now I'm quite rusty. My writing is less legible and requires more concentration.
Well, the learnedness as typist is probably not so much of a factor if you consider the setup:
(b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard.
That's really one thing that threw me off, when I stumbled upon it: How is this realistic typing?.. Sounds almost like comparing a flute and a piano and concluding the superiority of the former, because the pianist had to play only using one finger at a time?
I can barely handwrite a complete sentence anymore. I’ve never had good penmanship, but decades of keyboard use has rendered my writing skills almost useless… and I’m too old to care! :)
When I read a text that is either an unfamiliar topic or otherwise difficult I write it down by hand, word for word, into a spiral notebook as I read through it. I find that really helps to prevent me from skipping over passages without first understanding them.
I find the extraneous load helpful as it forces my attention. But this only works in cases when I can control the pace, such as when reading (as opposed to listening.)
They used to say that the act of writing on the test will remind you of writing notes. But now a lot of tests are also typewritten. Also, that sounds like a cramming strategy; I'd rather just learn the material for real.
I know lots of people swear that handwriting helps them with retention, but for me it's the polar opposite and always has been.
I hate writing with my hand. Hate it. It's slow, it's friction, and I have to pay attention to writing instead of thinking. To back up and dot my i's, whether I can cram another word on this line or not, do I need to slow down to be more legible or speed up to catch up? Ugh is my hand cramping? If I'm writing, I'm thinking about writing rather than thinking about the thing. You might as well be asking me to listen and waterski at the same time. It's not gonna help.
I love typing. It's effortless and fast and I can do it without thinking (or looking), so I'm actually thinking about the content of what I'm writing.
If I'm taking notes by hand in a lecture, I simply will not remember most of the lecture because I was too distracted by the mechanical process of writing it down. If I'm typing out notes, it's totally fine -- I pay attention perfectly, maybe even better because I've even got it outlined in sections.
I've always been baffled at how some people remember things better with writing. Are they better at multitasking? Are they bad at typing? Is writing just easier for them than it is for me? Is it something about muscle tension in the hand?
I'm right there with you. I can type faster than I can think, with very little effort. But I can't write and think at the same time. If I took handwritten notes in class, I didn't remember anything that was said. And I couldn't keep up, and it was illegible so I got nothing. Just listening was far better for me. I didn't know it in college, but I'd been diagnosed with dysgraphia as a very young child and was never told. Do an image search for adult dysgraphia handwriting examples. From your description I'd surprised if you couldn't find an example that was very close to yours. Like most learning differences it comes with some strengths, but knowing what advice doesn't apply to you is important.
If we take into account that the average person types less than 80 WPM (and that’s being generous) using a pecking technique and by looking at the keyboard, I can definitely understand how the average person would prefer writing over typing. After all, the same complaints that you have about writing apply to their typing technique. They think more about typing and which key to press, rather than the content.
Per another comment, this study enforced single-finger hunt-and-peck (and they specified which hand, you couldn't even use your dominant one if it was the other hand).
Same experience here. I also have ADHD so maybe that has something to do with it. I'm also willing to concede that maybe some peoples' brains are wired for it and some aren't, but that further supports my position against teachers universally applying this rule to students throughout my educational career.
Disclaimer, I love handwriting. TL;DR handwriting = write only + self-expression
I think that handwriting and its constraints, lead to a different mindset from when you're typing on a keyboard:
- It's write Only; You can't erase easily, so you either accept it and just keep pushing forward or you get distracted by not being able to do so (good), leading you to think twice before writing (bad).
- The physical coordination involved is a soothing and mindful process (at least for me) and it feels much more creative than typing. It's way easier to stay focused while doing so (might relate to my ADHD).
I rememeber vividly myself asking my dad when I was a kid why his handwriting was so different from what I learning at school. He told me that the success criteria for writing is can you read your own writing? Can you make an effort to make readable for others when you intend it to be read by someone else? If yes, that's good enough, nobody cares if you draw letters in a uncommon fashion, as long as they can understand the words.
While questionable at times, the way that doctors write follows this logic, because when writing the prescription the tend to optimize for writing more than reading, and therefore allow themselves more freedom.
I feel that once you've taken that step, writing becomes a much more enjoyable process. When I write, a "f" will be drawn differently, depending if it's the first letter of the word, or in the middle (as in "effort").
So I end up having three "modes" for handwriting:
- Ephemeral, I'll write things so quickly that I know I'll be able to decipher it only for a few days, while the topic is still fresh in my brain.
- Just for me, so I make zero efforts, just paying a bit more attention so I don't end up scribbling "effort" into "e||o||" which may cause problems in a month or two.
- For others, where I'll keep my handwriting peculiarities, but make sure it's absolutely decipherable (so no shortcuts, no stroked words, etc ..)
Strangely, I remember myself handwriting things, but I never remember typing something (though I'll remember about the thoughts of course). It's like handwriting is a more anchored experience somehow.
For young children the problem of writing with hand is twofold. First there is not enough motor control, children spend anywhere between 2-4 years to learn "good" handwriting. Some never get this even as adults. The physical strain of writing with hand is so much that there is no scope for reviewing or editing it, making it better. In fact it is given as a punishment "write this 100 times!". As adults we typically use typed stuff which we can edit, review and rewrite with much ease using word/text processors. This allows cognitive as well as physical affordance for the users. Now young children, by forcing them to handwrite, are denied both these affordances. Typing allows children to overcome the physical aspect of typing and focus on the content. I have had first graders touch-type in both Devanagari and Roman scripts just with 3-4 months of accessing the One Laptop Per Child. This immensely increased their vocabulary as well as expressiveness. When asked to handwrite the same, they would struggle even to construct simple sentences. Handwriting is a technology which was crucial in the past because we did not have a better alternative. Now that we have better alternatives they should be promoted and used. Studies like these muddy the waters. Did the authors of the study themselves only used handwriting to do this study themselves because it is beneficial ? Or they did use typing on a computer?
> The physical strain of writing with hand is so much
As a teacher my grandfather had a special fondness for teaching handwriting. He read literature on it and conducted his own experiments using his pupils, trying to figure out what worked and what didn't.
One of the things I recall vividly is him explaining to me as I started school, how it was vastly beneficial to use thick pencils when first learning to write by hand. He gave me, as he gave his students, a pencil he preferred which as I recall had a diameter about 1.5x a regular pencil. It was also slightly softer, around 2B.
As I recall his explanation was that the larger pencil required less motor skill precision, which lead to more relaxed fingers hence reduced strain. The softer graphite also required less pressure, again reducing strain.
As I recall he had found the reduction in strain really helped kids get comfortable with writing by hand.
I have had several quite funny (to me) anecdotes where I remember something vastly bigger (buildings that are "exactly the same but twice the height", huuuge houses from friends' parents, food being humongous, etc.). Don't underestimate the fact that as an adult you're about twice the size as when you were a kid learning to write! :)
That's why I estimate the diameter as 1.5X even though my memory feels more like 2X. In my case I had the larger pencils alongside regular-sized color pencils in my pencil case, so I do remember them being distinctly larger.
> For young children the problem of writing with hand is twofold. First there is not enough motor control
I feel like since I've mostly been typing things for the last 30 years that my motor control for hand writing isn't all that good anymore either. When I do write by hand it's less legible than it was when I was in my 20s (now in my 60s).
This smells a lot like "Past research has demonstrated that squashing grapefruits between your hands increases crucial muscular development in the arms of children. Therefore, we recommend that schools incorporate 'grapefruit squashing' into their curriculum."
I'll bet dollars to donuts that there are myriad ways to increase these connectivity markers in the brain without such laborious processes.
i beg to differ. if you want to write something down only three options come to mind: dictating with speech recognition, typing and handwriting. that's not analogous to asking what fruit or vegetable should children squish to develop forearm strength ... dictating i just added because it's technically an option. typing and handwriting are very different experientially.
Over and over this gets posted here. Next, someone will dig up yet another version of being active will also help memory retention. That'll get followed by the correlation of smells with memory retention. I can't remember which toga wearing philosopher it was, but he was known for taking his talks for a walk. Just a hint for someone else to make another post about.
I get it, somebody is today's 1 in 10000. I'm just trying to get them all in one place
Probably because it's been an active subject of research for decades. Search for "learning by writing things down". Not the only way to learn, obviously, since all of us also routinely learn by reading, listening, watching, experimenting, etc.
Sorry everyone, but this doesn't pass the smell test for me. Over half of their citations are for research that's 20-40 years old, and their more contemporary citations are from papers the authors themselves published in the last ten years.
Hard agree. The test protocol is one step removed from a Scientology e-meter and the prose makes it crystal-clear that these 'researchers' are seeking to confirm their biases.
This isn't genetics. There's not much research in these areas. And a lot of it would be unrelated to the current article. There's also very little progress, if any. You really have to do better than "a smell test" based on some superficial judgement.
This smells true to me, though I couldn't exactly explain why.
(baseless speculation below)
One thing I've noticed is how drastically my handwriting (and maybe hand dexterity in general) varies wildly from hour to hour, mostly depending on how tired I am or how much caffeine I've had.
If I'm feeling tired and sluggish, my handwriting is a disaster. It doesn't look good. It doesn't feel good. But after some caffeine, or otherwise becoming more alert, suddenly it looks better, and it feels much better as I do it.
Is this just me? I guess it's not surprising that caffeine would have an impact like this. But the part that's surprising to me is how pronounced and reliable it is.
For me it's just the act of writing. When preparing for an exam I would write tons of notes on paper, but I hardly read them. The act of writing on paper was enough.
I tried skipping the paper but typing notes didn't have close to the same effect, by an order of magnitude or two.
I still do this in meetings with customers and similar, keeping a small notebook. I'll write down key points, but I very seldom have to reference it later.
I am wondering for a long time whether this differs from person to person based on their preferred mode of thinking.
As a seemingly overly visual thinker the aspect of making several small decisions about how to layout what I'm writing down by hand also seems to play a huge role in that. I have to make positioning and thereby spacing and sizing decisions, choose the color, as well as making decisions on in what style (caps, cursive, script) I write each letter. I can easily use graphical elements like lines, arrows, boxes, etc.
Anything created digitally by primarily typing will always have a more dynamic and flowing nature, while following the linearity of the typed sequence of characters. It takes away a lot of the decisions that I have to make when laying out a handwritten note.
Anecdotally, I seem to remember mindmaps created with digital tools that rearrange elements automatically based on available space much less than hand-drawn ones. Yet, those come with their own downsides.
I suspect it's an embodied cognition thing. There is a very similar experience in musicians, where it's much much more difficult to reason about theory away from your instrument.
Even simple trivia type questions like "what's the V chord in F" are on basically instant recall for an experienced musician but without your instrument you have to stop and think (possibly even picturing your hands on your instrument) to answer.
To a limited extent I could see getting this result too, but from what I remember during school it wasn't the writing, it was the paper: I used spacial memory to remember which page and what location on the page something was at, instead of remembering the thing directly. And I could do it with things in textbooks I'd only read, not written.
For me my handwriting varies wildly based on what writing instrument I'm using. Fountain pen? Pretty good writing. Ball point pen? Pretty sloppy writing. Pencil? Somewhere in between, depending on what sort of pencil.
Handwriting things results in much better retention for me, but the notes are useless. Typed notes are a fantastic, easily edited artifact, but I feel the practice actually lowers my overall comprehension.
I want to concretely know if this is true, or just some weird bias.
I also want a tool that works well with both human memory and editability/searchability.
Yes I’d love to hear if anybody found any good note taking apps that do good ocr and that lets the notes be organized and tagged afterwards zettelkasten style.
rocketbooks are built around this exactly, theyre supposed to be reusable notebooks that you write in with one of those erasable pens and at the end of the day you get your phone and scan each page and erase them all ready for the next day
> b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard
The intro states they type one-fingered to avoid hard-to-interpret brain activity and then they draw conclusions as broad as "handwriting promotes learning" because using a pen activates more of the brain that hunt-and-pecking with one finger?
Sure - start with the doable and learn a little. But the breadth of conclusion here is seriously questionable vs. the method of the experiment.
I have a feeling this article is going viral amongst the Facebook crowd. Everyone over a certain age loves hearing how things really were better in the old days.
There may be merit to the research, or not; but that's not how the "popular" part of popular science works.
Wow, I thought it was just me: when learning a new language, I found that handwriting clearly enhanced my retention more than typing.
I also noticed that when learning math, handwriting enhanced my understanding more than typing, but I thought it was because typing latex was distracting.
Anecdotal info for myself - I learn by far most efficiently when I write on paper. Here's an interesting quote from "How to learn mathematics - The asterisk method"[0] around that:
> Copying material by hand is important because this forces the ideas to go through the mind. The mind is on the path between the eyes and the hands. So when you copy something, it must go through your mind!
For me this is definitely true. Maybe it's like that because when I was growing up we still didn't have smartphones, tablets and widespread computer use at schools and everything was written on paper with a pen/pencil. Most children and young people today probably don't use such tools as much as we did? With that said, I do believe there's something very real in the tactile and spatial feeling of writing on paper that does help learning and greatly improves memorising information. For myself it is definitely true. Maybe for a child today that would be an alien feeling? No idea. I'd be curious to read an actual research on something like this.
That quote doesn't quite explain the difference between writing and typing. Both use your hands after all.
What probably makes the most difference between the two is thinking about what you are writing. No matter how. Typing is likely to have the same effect provided you're not simply blindly copying stuff.
A more powerful effect that you hint at is the fact that writing by hand transfers the information to a physical location. You remove a layer of abstraction between your memory and what you've written down (yes we try to tie virtual stuff to a 'location' as well, but quite a lot of problems can be explained by people struggling with that abstraction).
> That quote doesn't quite explain the difference between writing and typing. Both use your hands after all.
True. Although the article is about writing on paper. I'm a pretty good touch typist and years of Vim have made me efficient with the keyboard. My typing is much faster than my writing. I'd say that even if I am thinking deeply about a subject, if I'm copying the text via typing, it I'll be a lot faster than writing. On the other hand writing gives me the opportunity to slow down. Maybe you're right that both should work equally if I'm invested mentally in the material, but then I'll have the internal pressure to type faster which might hurt that. As a physical motion typing is rather static when compared to writing, so I do believe an actual difference exists.
The speed difference between the two has been a point of friction for me in a couple of different scenarios.
It was something of a problem in university. While I’m not a particularly slow writer, I’m not a fast one either and as such it was often a struggle to keep up with what the professor was saying and putting up on the chalkboard when taking notes. Trying to summarize and write succinctly helped some but I’d still sometimes end up far enough behind that I ran out of mental “buffer” to summarize in which would lead to rote copying, making things even worse. All in all I regret not picking up a laptop of some kind for those years, because even 15 years ago I was much faster at typing.
These days when I write notes for studying the slowness isn’t an active problem, but more of a persistent irritation stemming from how much time is being spent that could be going elsewhere instead. This may just be an artifact of not writing often enough though.
I think if I was to do another university course, I'd just point a camera at the prof/white board for whatever they're talking about/writing, and then write down a much smaller set of things I'm interpreting for what they're talking about.
Quickly retyping/rewriting what they're saying never got me any benefit, though that was mech eng courses where nothing the lecturer says matters at all compared to practicing the math.
I've had success in a lecture situation by printing the slides beforehand with huge ass margins and then taking notes on said margins while the prof was talking.
That does require the lecture to have slides that are given to the students before the lecture though...
I want to write on paper more often, but one thing that keeps me from doing that is the feeling of a loss of privacy. I encrypt my notes on the computer. I like knowing that no one can read it - now or even when I am dead. Any suggestions?
If you are worried about that, you have to be really careful with OPSEC.
The "look over your shoulder" attack is omni-present. (Also easier to prevent with paper, in general, than with a larger computer screen.)
A simple safe will stop most prying people. And if you die... Well, you are dead... there ain't much stopping anyone at that point.
Keeping secrets is hard. Very hard. There's a reason for the most part... I don't bother, except if/when I need to, and even then, if they can be timed out, all the better.
Paper also has a big benefit in that we know how to destroy it. :)
... Simple things are often best. Understanding how your system will bend/break is critical in security situations.
Not OP, but you seem to be thinking about this in a particular way. There are some things I don't want to be read, but not in the sense that they're "high value" in a way that would attract motivated attackers. I'm not worried that my friends and family are going to shoulder surf, trick me, hack my devices, or threaten me with a big wrench to get at my private thoughts.
For these purposes, written journals or letters can be opened opportunistically if found. If I had a safe, it would be opened after my death. If the documents are known to exist in the clear anywhere, then they're subject to probate.
But if they're encrypted and the secret is unknown and hard to guess, then most likely everyone gives up and that's the end of that.
It's not a very rational fear. But there's a freedom that comes from knowing that nobody will read what you're writing; similar to the freedom you get from the anonymity on HN.
iPad + Apple Pencil + OneNote (encrypted end-to-end)
If you lose your onenote encryption key, your data is lost forever.
Another solution is Apple Notes with Advanced Data Protection turned on for your Apple ID. That encrypts your entire iCloud Drive with your encryption key and again if you lose your key data is gone; although there are some recovery options which require a trusted contact.
Taking notes is compression of facts or ideas that are "full size" in the mind at the moment of reception. More fidelity when typing, lower compression ratio, and thus better for comprehensive reference; a personalized textbook. Handwriting is intensive, slow, but potentially powerful compression that is much more lossy but capable of transmitting more bits of important information per page. Tradeoffs can be minimized by the ability to graph and edit page layout creatively while typing.
>our findings can be taken as evidence that handwriting promotes learning.
I don't like the way this is written. I much prefer a more ambiguous wording like, "our finding indicate that handwriting promotes learning."
Because the way it's written in the article, it sounds like that's the definitive truth, which it usually isn't. Life isn't black or white, it's a shade of gray.
But it is a really interesting article, because that's something that I always wonder when taking notes and such. But since I like the feel of the pen touching paper. I've leaned more towards that way. I have even bought ReMarkable 2 tablet for that reason (I don't own it any more though, as I was always slightly afraid to write on, just because of how expensive the device was - when compared to non-digital alternatives).
>In the present study, participants only used their right index finger for typing to prevent undesired crossover effects between the two hemispheres.
To me, this seems like quite an important factor, I hope that further studies will take typing with both hands into consideration as well.
To get more brain activity, you can also talk and dance during handwriting, but that extra effort will be detrimental for your memory
Just like in the other HN link on the supposed benefits of handwriting where the only benefit was it was too slow to follow the lecture, so students had to think more to staircase, and summarizing is beneficial
For me, writing with pen and paper provides my brain a physical anchor point, a real idea stored in time and space. I find much more connection to my writings when I know where it exists in a physical space, and where I was in a physical space when I wrote it. Digital doesn’t have that anchor point for me, it just goes “up in the cloud”, far and away where the sprites and fairies live. My most profound personal growth happened because of writing with pen, being able to diagram and have the flexibility of 2d space on a paper rather than 1d ish space on a word processor. That doesn’t mean I keep everything written down on paper, though. Usually just journals.
Also I find that because writing is slower than the brain it forces me to summarize my thoughts into less words, reducing the informational complexity… making it succinct and understandable
I suspect the background of the participants influenced the outcome of the study.
I wonder if the participants in the study spent more time hand writing or typing in their lives.
I also wonder if they spent more time engaged in deep though and learning while hand writing or while typing.
I spent far more time thinking and learning while typing. Therefore, my brain has wired itself to think and learn while typing.
There have been times when I was asked a difficult technical question, and had to make typing motions in the air and then check what I would have typed to be able to say the answer out loud.
It would be unfortunate for our society to study old people and misapply the results to young people.
I wonder if there are 3 groups in out society: The old learned by hand writing. The middle learned by typing. The young learned on touch screens.
i sort of specialize in meta cognition(zettelkasten, spaced repetition, incremental reading, speed reading etc)
i believe the effects of writing by hand are so maginal you would re-gain it by not having to re-type your notes. putting them into spaced repetition etc.
just make everything digital and then OCR the rest.
I agree with the sentiment here, but I couldn't find a way to scale when working with others over async document communication channels. However, I did a self experiment and realized using markdown in electronic communication, google docs (even if its not supported) is much better at create a mind map of knowledge than regular text. I don't know why. My current ranking model is:
1. Is this knowledge for me? Write in a notepad. Upload a screenshot to my personal rambling google doc.
2. Is this knowledge for a group that includes me? Use markdown text files (READMEs, Google Doc etc.)
3. Resort to Wiki or a Rich Text Editor.
The study should have compared handwriting not only with typewriting, but also with drawing, in order to reach a useful conclusion.
Practicing handwriting as a child is certainly useful for developing fine control of hand movements, but practicing other similar activities, like drawing, carving etc. might be the same or even better.
I believe that since the beginning it may be better to use typewriting for doing useful work, but practicing in parallel calligraphy may be as useful as practicing various sports, for developing the ability of doing delicate manual work, like reworking a prototype electronic device.
I got through undergrad just by taking notes in lectures and while I read; I almost never needed to study (some math stuff excepted). It's become a useful skill in life; notating discussions, meetings, etc. People are generally low-key worried you're goofing off when you're typing away on your computer, but if you're taking notes on a notepad it's obvious you're engaged.
I'm a good typist so, I type everything else. If I'm doing meeting notes for others even, I type those. But I definitely remember way, way less.
As I read this the extent of the research is this moment of encoding the knowledge in notes.
I’m curious about accessing data in notes. Typed notes are useful for fast lookup (text search). Handwritten notes have an interesting aspect where you find things quickly based on the irregularities of your notes—layout, notes on notes-which create visual differences. In the same way, my artistic sketches from old sketchbooks bring to mind the circumstances of my having made the drawing.
Handwriting might be good for memorisation (write a video transcript by hand and you'll remember most of it for a week. good way of finishing studies for a test), but my calligraphy is so horrendous that anything wrote with a pen is probably lost forever regardless of how i store them.
Typed docs might be ephemeral to the brain, but the presentation is clearer and more malleable
The participants of the study use only right index finger to typewrite in the experiments.
I don't think it's fair to compare it with handwriting.
Usually when you are handwriting, you hardly use both hands. So it's like a natural way to do it.
However, I don't know anyone that typewrite using just their right index finger.
I think it would generate more compatible with reality results if the participants had used both hands.
Anecdotally: I've been taking notes by hand recently after years of taking notes via text file. My personal experience has been a noticeable increase in retention and reduced need to go back to the notes I've taken and refresh my memory. I believe there is some unknown process that leads to improves memorization in the act of writing things down by hand.
> I believe there is some unknown process that leads to improves memorization in the act of writing things down by hand.
It isn't exactly 'unknown' - every teacher I've ever met has said 'if you write it down you'll remember it better' and Tom Clancy made 'if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen' a major plot point in one of his novels.
Intuitively this is obvious. how can you compare multi dimension freedom with linear imposed thought?
White paper and a pen is a freedom climax.
Drawing , just unrolling and creating thoughts in live mode without constraint is a pleasure. A line and a paragraph? compared to drawing? Pen is a extension of the mind. This article may face obvious biaised reception.
I force my students to turn in handwritten math homework (two problems per week), mainly because I want them to practice for the exam and we don't have another system scaling (easily) up to 300+ exam goers. Recently I have seen more discussion on the benefits of handwriting and I wonder if there is something more to argue for the practice...
The human body seems to be designed to talk. Talking is generally learned automatically. Reading and writing are not automatic. Talking also has nuances that are lost in transcription. Maybe the more a recording act resembles talking, the better.
My vague hypothesis then is this: the body has finite energy. Energy that goes into one thing has an opportunity cost. If handwriting takes more energy than typing, it is taking away from something else.
And as we consider which recording method to use, it might make sense to use the one that lights up not the motor areas controlling the hand but instead the regions of the brain where discursive knowledge lives. We want stronger connections between ideas, not between ideas and hand motions.
Incidentally for the past year or so I’ve been recording many voice memos to myself. It’s kind of fun even. I can just talk while I’m walking. The trouble with recordings is consuming them is not as easy.
My preferred way of taking notes is via e-ink tablet with pen using Swipe, which seems like a weird hybrid of handwriting and typing. Should I expect "positive" effects similar to writing via hand or rather that of typing?
Typing can only get faster, but handwriting can get better. I myself also like to think while writing, and it indeed helps me. Of course, after writing, I will take a photo and save it to iCloud, or simply retype it into Google Docs.
My own experience over decades has been hand write that which must be remembered or understood longer term. Everything else is temporal so quickly type into searchable notes.
That is a fun paper to read. Anecdotally I found early on that actually writing my thoughts in a notebook was, for me, a much better way of developing and retaining knowledge.
It could just as well be the worst of both world too though. Loss of physicality and constraints because of unlimited virtual paper combined with notes you can’t read because of handwriting. I prefer your optimism though.
Most tablet note taking apps I've seen transcribe the hand written notes to text.
I recently bought an android tablet with proper wacom stylus support and active stylus for my 4 year old kid to practice writing (...they want to do it with the tablet, but don't want to on paper...I figure any practice is better than nothing). The active stylus is very good, but I can't imagine using it for any serious amount of writing - it just feels too weird.
Even more connectivity might be gained by writing while riding a bicycle, or being chased by a lion while typing out your thesus. If brain connectivity is the goal, any increase in complication should work. Texting while driving probably increases brain connectivity. That doesnt mean it should be encouraged.
> shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.
They found activity in desirable parts of the brain. Being chased by a lion would trigger panic responses and parts of your brain would be shut down. So no, any increase in complication will not work. I certainly doubt texting while driving will work to improve connectivity in the parts of your brain required for safe driving.
Texting while driving is actually a desirable skill for military pilots. They specifically look for people who can drive a vehicle while holding a conversation and monitoring several screens. Being chased by a lion would certainly focus the parts of the brain covering perception, balance and coordination. And learning to control one's panic responce is essential cognitive development imho. My point is that essentially any complex activity is a learning experience, a time of increased brain activity.
The article and study is not about learning though, it is specifically about memory. I doubt anyone would claim that learning to drive was best done by taking notes at a lecture (texting or otherwise), as it is about training reflexes and habits, essentially so you can do it without thinking. Because thinking is slow. But maybe the best way to to learn Latin irregular verbs is to scream them out while being chased by a lion; that would require further study.
Somewhat related, I recall a study on how we find it easier to perform complex mechanical tasks while moving our tongues or sticking them out. Which seems to be how our brains use of language gets tied to physical activity when we need to really concentrate and engage higher thought. I can grasp how writing could well improve memory formation, forcing us to codify thought into language, engaging those parts of the brain that use language for reasoning. But interesting if typing does it worse.
> I certainly doubt texting while driving will work to improve connectivity in the parts of your brain required for safe driving.
Well the more you do it, the better you'd get at it. The problem isn't that doing it makes you unsafe, it's that most people are not actually capable of doing it safely and we don't necessarily want people to risk other peoples' lives learning how to do it better.
There's value in thinking about the topic you're trying to learn, while you're learning it. When I was in college, I handwrote my notes, then I switched to typing, then I switched to no notes. Just paid close attention in lecture and thought about the topic during any pauses in talking. Worked wonders.
Part of this relied on the professors distributing lecture slides afterwards, which they always did. Helped jog my memory later and remind me of what to study for the final.
I tried handwriting notes several times in my math classes. It did not work well. I am not a fast or neat writer, so it was always a desperate struggle to keep up. Many professors preferred not to distribute any notes or slides, and loved to lecture on the board at lightning speed (writing and erasing at least a dozen boards worth of material in 50 minutes). When I switched to typing my notes in LaTeX (using vim) it made all the difference. I could actually keep up with the professor and think about what they were saying without getting hopelessly behind on the proof.
The strategy of only writing down the important details that everyone advocates does not work very well in math. I can't know what the important details are until days or even weeks after the lecture, when I've had enough time to digest and work through the material while completing the assigned problems. Of course, this is much more true at the beginning of a course (when I've had no prior exposure to the topic) than it is at the end.
I took math LaTeX notes in Vim too. Once I got past the learning curve, it was much faster than writing just because of the ability to copy-paste a proof line. It was even an ok form of scratch space for solving problems, though pencil+paper was usually best. But I didn't take enough math classes to really see if it'd help, and in comp sci classes it didn't.
I was a math major and I just kept using LaTeX + vim for my whole degree. I got better and better at it and used snippets as well as wrote my own TeX macros to save tons of time.
I went back and forth between pencil and paper and LaTeX for assignment work. For some courses the proofs were fairly short so it was easy enough to work on paper. For others, the proofs could get several pages long and small mistakes could lead to lots of erasing. It doesn't take very much erasing/rewriting to annoy me enough to switch over to LaTeX. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than erasing and/or rewriting half a page of material because of some mistake.
Would be interesting if someone made a hardware device to be placed in classrooms which took periodic photos of the board and transcribed it into searchable text using an LLM.
I have taken photos of the board and I've seen lots of classmates do it as well. I had one prof who absolutely forbid any photos in class, even if they were just of the notes on the board. I saw one student defy him and take photos anyway. After class he sprinted over to that student and demanded to see his ID, which he photographed and then left.
The poor student followed him all the way out of the room and down the hall, begging not to be reported to the associate dean's office!
There is definitely a quality balance to be had between taking notes and understanding, particularly true if you know you aren't going to go back and put in the proper time to study the notes you made afterward. For an extreme example I had a calculus class where your notes were graded but if you wanted an A you pretty much had to write the entire book section set by hand. It resulted in one of the worst retention rates I had of any class because it was a mad dash to write everything down to get the A and then you had to go back and spend time trying to think about what you just wrote. On the other hand in another calculus class notes weren't graded and I ended up with basically 1 sheet (front/back) with a few notes on things I didn't get 100% or wanted to remind myself of later and then spent 10 minutes outside of class reviewing those to great success.
as a neuroscientist (who hasn't read the paper but approaches such work with general skepticisms), this is a reasonable take and an important point. Too often, trivial points are elevated to pseudo-profundity.
Yet another study comparing handwriting with one handed typing. Actually worse than that - they didn't even display the letters typed.
Even if that were somehow ok, they should have seen greater visual engagement for hunt and peck one finger typing (exclusively right index finger).
No mention in their methodology if they allowed students to practice the one word they gave them to write five times either, which further pollutes the data.
Bottom line - poorly designed study produces predictable results and researchers use that soapbox to suggest educational policy.
Could never find anything again long after I wrote it, or took way too long to look it up. Idiotically transcribing my notes into emails to send off as meeting notes.
Switched to typing everything, even stream-of-consciousness stuff for myself, a couple years ago and would never want to go back. Feel quite foolish for falling for this for so long.