I just want to add a gigantic caveat: NOT FOR EVERYBODY.
I know a lot of people who insist writing by hand helps them. But I also know it's TERRIBLE for me personally.
The article claims:
> Writing by hand on paper creates a tactile, personalized experience... The complex experience of hand writing on paper contains a multitude of variable elements: the creativity of an individual’s written representation of language, the texture of the paper itself, the fine motor skills needed to translate thoughts into written language, the engagement of the physical senses... All of these complexities create a stronger memory of the information that is taken in during the note taking.
Well, no. For me, all of that is a bunch of irrelevant noise. I hate writing, it's so much slower and more awkward than typing (for me), I'm constantly concerning myself with whether I can keep up, whether I should start the next word on the same line or next line, whether it's clear enough for me to read later or if I should repeat the word, whether I need to slow down to be more legible but if that means I won't be able to keep up, whether I need to click the pencil again...
Writing requires me to use a significant amount of my brain for it, and this is taking away from my actual concentration on the content I'm trying to learn. It's not creating "stronger memories" for me, it's creating irrelevant distraction. (Whereas typing for me is effortless muscle memory that takes almost zero effort, so I can direct most of my concentration to the material itself.)
Again, I don't question that it helps some people. But presenting it as universal is just flat-out wrong.
The research cited does not make any statements about improved recall of facts based on note taking (handwritten vs typed). I have found EEG studies [0] that do not actually measure a learning outcome, studies on letter recognition [1], and calendar apps vs physical calendar [2].
Citing studies which do not prove the thesis is actually worse than citing nothing at all. The fact that there is not a cited study showing clear memorization outcomes of typing vs handwriting, I would actually conclude the opposite of what the article is trying to say.
More generally I think the idea that "The article does at least attempt to cite some research" is very problematic if the cited papers don't actually show what the article is stating.
As a person with ADHD, that slower, deliberate nature goes against everything my brain wants. Even when learning from video, certain speakers seem too slow, and my brain prefers speedy information intake otherwise it wanders off to another universe.
I think my brain has a pretty wide bus, but no guarantees it has the next gen processor, and definitely no ECC memory, information gets corrupted and lost all the time. That's ADHD.
On a related note: many autistic people suffer from forms of dyspraxia that make writing by hand physically unpleasant in addition to the ouput being hard to read.
Personally I like using pen and paper for dumb sketching because it helps me persist mental models in case I get distracted. But I find it really tedious for anything that requires any serious amount of information density or permanence. I've always avoided taking notes in classes because writing by hand felt tedious and slow, and typing created too many distractions if it was socially acceptable (or even allowed) at all.
I still flinch whenever someone asks me to take notes because even the process of transforming live conversations into serial form requires so much processing I can't fully pay attention to what's actually being said and risk losing track.
Perhaps an even bigger caveat is that you have prescribed this to note taking from a live discussion.
That isn't what you've said, but you imply that repeatedly.
And by the distinct set of circumstances (recording verbatim) in which writing is vastly inferior to typing, your position is noteworthy. I would argue that a microphone is even still vastly superior & can provide text output. However, whether or not you retain (this is about memory) all that information is another question all together.
If you take your typed notes and then read through them while writing out key elements, you're retention and memory will likely be greatly improved.
Aside, based on your complaints and the fact you said pencil, I'm guessing that your skill with a pen is poor. Writing in general takes practice to master, it is not simply literacy.
Edit:
>Although typing notes can be useful and even faster for some note-takers, ultimately it does not have the cognitive, tactile, memory, or visual cognitive effects that people can get when they write by hand. Typing notes can be good, but it won’t make it easier to remember what was said later on.
I was always told in school that I needed to take notes. So I did. And then I had no idea what was going on because all of my energy went into taking notes.
Eventually I gave up. It's amazing how much you can learn when you simply listen. I wish I would have realized that sooner.
Yeah, I guess this comes down to how your brain works best, because it's the complete opposite for me -- just listening would result in almost no understanding or retention.
But, if I just took even crappy notes, I would remember and understand MUCH better. I rarely looked at the notes afterwards, just the act of writing it down was critical for me.
----
Edit: sometimes, the topic wasn't a great fit for notes, so I would doodle instead. Same benefits. The brain is weird.
I find it odd that we were always encouraged to take notes, but never once taught how to do it. Most people tried to furiously write what was being said verbatim, which is definitely not ideal. A simple introduction to note taking would have helped so many people.
More to your point, that's definitely a strategy that works for some people. When I had two weeks of jury duty, everybody was pretty consistently scribbling notes on the various complexities of the case except one woman, who was staring off into space and looked like she wasn't paying any attention. I figured she'd be a dud, but when it came to deliberations, she was probably the sharpest one in the room.
I actually lost the ability to write after a small stroke. Comes out as nonsense. Can still type at 80wpm just fine.
Apparently different parts of the brain.
How interesting! Have you done any experiments to try to identify the “line” between the two skills? For example, can you write individual letters in isolation? Like a single letter “T” by itself?
And can you still draw shapes? (Like a circle? Which is basically an “O”.) If so can you draw a series of shapes? A circle, a square, and a triangle? Have you tried writing words with your non-dominant hand? It won’t look very nice but I wonder if the jumble impacts both sides or just the side that “knows” how to write?
I can write for about 10-30 seconds. Then characters turn to scribbles. If I’m insanely slow and careful I can last a minute or so. It has improved in the last few years.
I was a minor artist before. I could still draw mostly fine even at my worst.
Work stuff was weird. If A bug report came in I could find the root issue faster then most anyone. But I could no longer solve the problem. Even if was totally trivial.
Got by mostly by helping other people find out what was wrong with code.
Thankfully I’m getting close to my old ability to write code.
I know for me personally; I always absorb more information when I am just listening and not writing.
When I'm writing whatever the teacher is saying, I can't understand it at the same speed. So I just write without actually comprehending the sentences.
But my listening was always so good that I rarely took notes throughout all my school years. I would just stare at the teacher and listen without writing anything.
> For me, all of that is a bunch of irrelevant noise.
I share that exact same experience you describe.
For me, learning is all about making connections between the new material and material I already know.
If I kept notes I would have to do three things at once: (1) Follow the material, (2) try to question the material and search my brain for material I already know to make connections with, and (3) take notes, and there's just not enough cognitive capacity to do all three.
Taking notes means turning off the making-connections piece, and that's the most valuable piece to me, and I believe that this is not just a subjective experience, but something that would affect other people too: Focussing on note-taking instead of connections, creates a qualitatively different learning outcome, namely one that leans more towards superficial rote reproduction and less towards real understanding.
In school, when the teacher said something that was unclear or that flat out made no sense, I'd frequently be the one to ask for clarification. Then 20 other heads would pop up from their note-taking and notice that they didn't understand it either, but somehow they didn't notice, and I did. ...they would have happily reproduced the material that made no sense given the right prompt in an exam situation, but that didn't change anything about the fact that they didn't understand it.
What's more: I couldn't engage in that style of learning even if I wanted to. Like: If I tried to turn off the part of my brain that searches for meaning, e.g. when something simply has no meaning, like an exact date of an event in history that I need to know for an exam, then I still wouldn't remember the damned date, plus I wouldn't remember any of the broad themes either. The only thing that would happen would be that my brain would be bored and would wander off thinking about something else that's more interesting.
I can sympathize with this quite a bit. My own note-taking in college was pretty bad and at the time I would have cited speed as part of it.
What I've learned since then is to introduce a buffer between the consumption of the material and the making of the note. Instead of trying to keep up, I'm trying to fill the buffer to the point where I can summarize and re-state the material in my own words and write that down.
I slip into old habits sometimes, but for me the recap-then-write approach has been helpful and I suspect it's part of the value so many see to handwritten notes. You can't take a transcription (I could probably transcribe a lot of meetings or lectures on a keyboard) so you have to condense and the condensation, as much as anything, is probably what matters.
But the issue is when the explanation doesn’t stop. I was great at condensing in college, but while trying to formulate my own words, the prof was already explaining the next topic which I would then miss entirely. This was extra-apparent for formula-heavy courses.
So I basically reverted to lossy transcription of what the professor said, which sucked. And I was bad at retaining lectures.
I end up changing things up a lot. It partly depends on my purpose for taking notes. If I want to capture more or less verbatim quotes for an article without going back to a recording, I generally type. It's also much easier to share notes in that form.
But if I mostly want to capture highlights, especially if I'm also doing something like taking pics of slides, I generally prefer writing. There are also settings where having a laptop between yourself and the person you're speaking with feels off-putting whereas taking some handwritten notes seems fine.
I recently learned of Dysgraphia from an interview with Eric Weinstein. For some, writing notes on paper actively destroys recall. Western education pretty much forces students to take notes by hand, which is understandably a nightmare for those afflicted. I wish I could find the specific clip I'm thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia.
It maybe if you grew up writing with pencil or typing.
For me writing is huge help in retaining information. I also know people who swear by typing but they all are younger who grew up with computers.
Also the handwritten notes don’t need to write everything in alphabets. The biggest advantage of writing is freeform. I could draw a diagram or other doodles. My old notes of drawings of the classroom, random objects, etc. I think those doodles helped me retain some information.
I mostly agree, learning efficiency is not directly tied to the method, but how the brain processes it over time and may even require multiple methods to sufficiently learn something. I wouldn't be surprised if emotions or feeling frustrated while trying to learn hampers it as well.
This is why open book examinations are a thing. Memorization is rather redundant IMO. Being able to use the concepts to solve the problems is an important skill.
You need to memorise enough of the topic to know what to look up in a book.
You need to memorise enough of the topic that you can draw relationships between disparate elements.
Having content in your memory means you have the ability to potentially pull it up quicker, or to pull it up in a situation (such as a team meeting) where you don't have access to the book.
If you rely only on what's previously written, foregoing memorisation, you are limited to the relationships that other people have written down.
Agreed. IMO, the real crux is whether you have the inclination to write down what you're taking notes on verbatim. In fact, I think it comes down to one of the following:
1. If you have an inclination to write things down verbatim, which tool/method is slow enough to force you to paraphrase?
2. If you don't have such an inclination and already tend to paraphrase, which has the least cognitive load in using? Not which engages the most senses or motor skills.
Once you develop a habit of putting what you're taking notes on into your own words, you can move from 1 to 2. However, I think most people have the inclination of 1 and tend to fall back to it when they move to 2.
Because I'm one of those people, handwriting was the best method for me for a long time, until I started my master's program where all the professors have either put out a list of learning objectives at the beginning of the course or at beginning of each lecture/unit. Now, I type my notes. I form those learning objectives as questions and try to answer them as I take notes. Outside of classes, I list the objectives of the meeting/research as questions, adding new questions as they come up, and trying to answer them.
This method has been more effective than anything else I've done and typing is really the only way to do it fast enough for me.
I know a lot of people who insist writing by hand helps them. But I also know it's TERRIBLE for me personally.
The article claims:
> Writing by hand on paper creates a tactile, personalized experience... The complex experience of hand writing on paper contains a multitude of variable elements: the creativity of an individual’s written representation of language, the texture of the paper itself, the fine motor skills needed to translate thoughts into written language, the engagement of the physical senses... All of these complexities create a stronger memory of the information that is taken in during the note taking.
Well, no. For me, all of that is a bunch of irrelevant noise. I hate writing, it's so much slower and more awkward than typing (for me), I'm constantly concerning myself with whether I can keep up, whether I should start the next word on the same line or next line, whether it's clear enough for me to read later or if I should repeat the word, whether I need to slow down to be more legible but if that means I won't be able to keep up, whether I need to click the pencil again...
Writing requires me to use a significant amount of my brain for it, and this is taking away from my actual concentration on the content I'm trying to learn. It's not creating "stronger memories" for me, it's creating irrelevant distraction. (Whereas typing for me is effortless muscle memory that takes almost zero effort, so I can direct most of my concentration to the material itself.)
Again, I don't question that it helps some people. But presenting it as universal is just flat-out wrong.