Maybe handwriting engages the brain more because that's how most people worked while learning new things as a child? Is there a chance the next generation will have the opposite correlations?
The article says "handwriting", but there's nothing to support cursive vs. printing as a contributing factor.
Otherwise, I believe it. There's a reason we have a practice called "whiteboarding" in tech, and one of the biggest adjustments to remote work for me has been using digital whiteboards.
I agree on the iOS 14 handwriting update... for Chinese. Despite normally being easier to process than, the Latin alphabet recognition is poor, in normal condition of writing (i.e. I won’t adjust my writing to olease the system). Or made it’s the model language that only knows English? Anyway it didn’t feel good enough yet for real world usage.
I believe it to. Anecdotally, my old method for studying while in school was just to handwrite out notes as I read. I would not even go back to review them as the act of simply writing it out by hand was enough to retain it. Typing I feel like is much more autopilot. The amount of times I misspell or write the incorrect word while typing is way higher than anything done by hand.
That said, my handwriting is also atrocious and I would not want to ever have to disseminate something in that form over a nice, typed document.
Our brains are (to use a crude analogy) muscle movement computers/orchestra conductors. I reckon there are just more parts of your brain involved creating specific fine motor movements for holding a pen/pencil than just tapping keys that never really move relative to your hands.
It’s not relevant to the study in TFA, but I believe handwriting notes is more effective because you can’t just transcribe - you have to instead understand the concept and restate it briefly enough to keep up.
400 CPM is only 80 WPM using the normal `WPM = CPM / 5` formula. Most of my coworkers are well past 80wpm (we played a few of those typing games during the shelter-in-place order), and stenographers or court reporters generally average above 200wpm with some in the low 300s.
Anecdotally, I never had an issue transcribing college lectures when it was just spoken word. My problem was when the professor started to write on the board. Diagrams and stuff were always obnoxious to transcribe quickly, but that was before the days of the iPad and such.
By the time I got to the university I was using a premechanical[0] Rapidograph fountain pen to take lecture notes on high quality paper where I wrote down everything the professor wrote on the board, everything they said, and everything I thought about it at the time, especially something that might make a performance difference.
I don't know how it compares to an ipad, but it was great because there was less friction and latency compared to a pencil or ball point pen. It did change your writing since you had to hold it almost vertical, not as big a change as the increased speed though. With a thin tip you could make small detailed diagrams.
[0] like this:
https://www.blackrockgalleries.com/product/vintage-rapidogra...
Note: does not actually take a cartridge, it's a suction plunger assembly for liquid ink uptake, attached to the color-coded tip-size indicating band. You may want a thinner tip than No. 2 and ink having different viscosity, solids content, and drying rate than used for engineering drawing.
600cpm is quite realistic, 400cpm would not strike me as outrageous in the least. Do some tests on 10fastfingers to see where you're at, it lists both cpm and wpm.
I will say there are issues aside from speed, though. Sometimes it just gets overwhelming keeping up and you may freeze up for a sec.
But everybody has far from exactly the same parts of the brain performing the same duties for the same things all the time.
And data output is not the same as data entry.
Seems to me there are big differences in what parts of the brain are engaged manually versus mechanically in other ways too, and that should lead to even bigger differences between individuals.
Due to differences in brain wiring and structure, some parts of the brain may be much more efficient than others at the same process, and this is also different between individuals.
Some tasks are likely to require more overhead to result in an equivalent outcome as well.
Manual placemarking, art, language, documentation, machine operation, with direct memory access are all different things, and also are expected to interact in different ways for different people of different cultures.
What if the documentation, machine operation, and direct memory access combine to form the working foundation earlier in the learning cycle than other possible elements with or without very much freehand work at all?
Right - writing slows down the rate at which the writer’s attention moves from one concept to another, which in turn means more time is spent per concept. This apparently results in better memory retention.
True, I always took math notes in LaTeX which I am fluent in and still it is much slower. Makes you think about how you can distill an idea down into key concepts which leads to active learning IMO.
I still keep all my math notes in LaTeX although I'm considering trying a reMarkable. They have handwriting to text conversion, wonder if there is handwriting to TeX conversion.
I found in my case, well prepared lectures where I write using pen and paper allows me to more closely follow the steps and arguments. The slower pace of writing allows for more time to think about what I write.
Often it would stick so well I didn't need the notes afterwards, but I had to go through that process of writing them.
An important part here is that I'm basically copying the lecturer, so I don't have to think about what to write. Once I have to that I learn almost nothing.
For me this is part of the reason why I learn a lot less when taking notes on my computer, as suddenly I have distractions like having to care about formatting, drawing boxes and arrows etc. On paper you just move your hand a little, draw bigger letters, or draw a box. It's not something you have to think about.
I had mainly math and physics though, might be different for other topics.
And yet every time you bring it up with people, they are quick to dismiss the notion that hand-writing something is any different from typing it other than being slower.
“Handwriting can be quite messy and they take a lot of time. So, instead of spending the majority of the time writing, the spend it typing instead. The students are more in touch with computers and are much slower when they handwrite.”
> Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!" -- that is the motto of enlightenment.
- Immanuel Kant
"An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"
(Was ist Äufklarung?)
(30 September, 1784) [0]
Anytime we read a paper book or write with a pen, we break free of the tyranny of the device. The mind is one step further removed from the connected mob and therefore one step closer to thinking on its own terms.
The absolute state of Twitter says everything about the cogitation required to type: none at all. Yet, the spray-painted vandalism seen in public spaces is only marginally more informed.
Cuneiform is far more engaging of the faculties and demanding of careful composition. Struck by a strange mood, the aspiring author must gather clay from the river at low ebb, gather ash wood or reed and craft styluses, and must also build an oven, all the while lovingly musing upon the intended opus. Any mistake is the ruin of the opus. The tablet must be smashed and new clay gathered. In comparison, handwriting is but the careless ejaculation of worthless ink; fit only for brief amusement and animalistic territorial piss-marking.
You’ll note the erudition of this post. Indeed, I pound my words into my laptop with a hammer and then cook the bastard thing in an oven in order to submit.
I doubt the scribes of Sumeria bother doing the tablet themselves. They were among the top of society, they probably had people making the tablet for them (at least the clay preparation, apprentice modeling the tablets from it). You don’t create a piece of paper from scratch either everytime you want to write.
Most surviving cuneiform is that kind of thing. Various incidental items, though, like the complaint letters sent to Ea-Nasir [1], suggest that casual discourse was far from unknown and may just have usually been done with un-fired clay that wouldn't have lasted for long periods.
You speak of cuneiform as it is the highest form of expression. That is foolish, for how does it compare to the high art of painting on a cave wall? Rhetorical question, poorly of course. Cuneiform completely bypasses hunting for most crimson okra , blackest ash, and sparkling chalk. And that is before we get to the availability of the writing surfaces. Tablets are cheap but caves are rare! We are talking about pondering for many moons of what messages to send to the far futures versus mindless hammering of most inane things. It is plainly obvious that the gulf between the two is like that of Arecibo message compared to a conversation between two twitter bots.
Given the most pervasive argument that is as a matter of fact is a fact. I am sure you will agree that cave paintings are the most superior form of communication bar none.
That would be backwards. GPT-3 was trained on content and comments from the internet so it quite literally writes like him. Considering the length of his comment it is probably fairly biased towards his style of writing.
I noticed the "type faster than I can think" phenomenon when I switched to a Kinesis Advantage for the first time and took a significant speed hit. My writing immediately improved because I had more time to choose words before I got to them. When I'm typing normally at 100WPM I am forced to pick words much faster.
The biggest complaint of all I have against Silicon Valley is exactly this attempt to make us 'bodyless'. The truth is, if you're everywhere, you're nowhere. And if you're not grounded in your physicality, you're a "candle in the wind".
In my religious tradition, demons, or their effects, are essentially disembodied thoughts ("logismoi"). Which supports my experience that social media can be hell on earth.
In my case this is definitely true. It is much better for me to remember handwritten notes than typed ones. In college, one of my study methods was to transcribe my typed notes into handwritten ones. I took typed notes in the first place for the simple reason that I type _much_ faster than I write.
Professionally, I am still the same way. When flipping back from pen-and-paper to something like Evernote I definitely remember written ones better.
Long-term I'm looking for a solution where I can take notes handwritten and OCR scan it into a digital platform to have the best of both worlds (my memory plus full text search, sorting, and tagging)
I remember turning in a rather embarrassing paper in college because I wrote it from beginning to end on my computer, instead of writing the first draft longhand, as I had always done previously. (Okay, full disclosure: I wrote it through the night before the day it was due. But that wasn't anything I hadn't done before.)
I'm older than the "digital natives." I was born in 1967 and went back to college as an adult. This story I'm telling happened in the late '90s. But, in retrospect, I really felt my typing speed was faster than my thinking speed. Pencil-to-paper is a much slower process and seemed better suited to wrestling with complicated thoughts.
I would say I've since adapted and can write first drafts at the keyboard. (I'd say I adapted before I got out of college.) But longhand still seems more intimately connected to my brain.
Quite the contrary is the case. Whenever the brain gets stimulated, it forms more or "better" connections.
It's not helpful to compare the brain to a computer in this sense, because both simply work in vastly different ways.
The more you use your brain, the better it gets at the task and in general (at least to a certain degree). This is not the case with CPUs, which only get hotter and often slower (i.e. running at lower clock speeds) when utilised more.
The primary advantage that I notice of writing complex thoughts by hand, for example a first draft of something important, is that insertion of more than a few words is difficult on paper. Therefore I tend to work just a bit more deliberately and focus a bit more on the narrative structure. The results tend to have a more coherent narrative flow, be easier to read, and be more organized than a draft written on a computer where I can jump back and forth between partially-completed paragraphs or sections.
Similarly, decreasing the accessibility of information, code, etc. helps me develop the narrative when making the first draft.
I get a pretty big productivity bump from bringing a notebook to a desk or table away from a computer (with its attendant distractions) and spend an hour or two, producing a page or two, that require much less editing later. I can leave little spaces for numbers or other specifics that I don't have on hand, and make marginal notes for other things to research or fill in later, while focusing on the structure and organizing my thoughts and arguments. Afterwards I can make figures, check calculations and statistics, etc.
I also frequently draw out powerpoint presentations on graph paper, maybe 8 slides per paper page, and just write the basic points and sketch in the figures I want to add. Then I go through and actually make the slides at the computer.
Does higher measured brain activity for one task relative to another performed by the same individual conclusively mean that task is "better", or maybe just that individual is more efficient/practiced/comfortable with the other task?
I agree that this is common sense; I've been cognizant of this effect ever since I was in college. However, sometimes common sense turns out to be wrong, so there is value in actually putting common sense to the test.
I have for along time carried around notebooks for note taking and journaling, because I felt the process of handwriting improve my experience of organizing my thoughts. But it was cumbersome and I ended up carrying multiple notebooks for different purposes.
Since I got the reMarkable 2 tablet it has replaced all my notebooks while retaining all the benefits of handwriting. With the added bonus of much easier organizing, backup and being able to view the notes on other devices.
How close is the experience of using R2 close to using pen on paper? Can you please elaborate more on what aspects make you absolutely love it?
I tried Apple pencil with iPad Pro but couldn’t find any app and neither does the HW replicate the pen on paper exp and it’s probably not designed/meant for it either.
There was a Youtube reviewer who said it was so much like pencil on paper that he forgot it wasn't real paper and attempted to smudge the graphite on it with his finger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9wudCMFWPQ&t=16s
I got an ELECOM paper feel screen protector for iPad Pro that gets about 70% of that paper feel. It still doesn’t feel as nice as remarkable tablet though. I own both 2nd gen iPad Pro and remarkable tablet 1.
The experience is very close. Much more so than with an iPad and Apple Pencil.
I guess what I love about it is that in many ways combines the best of both physical and digital writing. It feels very much like writing with a real piece of paper, and it does not have any distracting apps like social media or a web browser. It also brings the benefits of being a digital device, in that you can edit things after the fact. Such as rearranging pages. Selecting portion of a text or drawing and then move it within the page, or to another page. Do copy and paste, and things like that.
I am deciding if I should cancel my order or not. I like the idea of a dedicated almost paper like feel. I hate the idea of my notes in some cloud service. You do not need anything to read a physical journal other than the book itself. Is there anyway to back note up to a physical copy (prints?
Since the remarkable tablets features native SSH access, there is an active and growing community that makes really great software for these tablets. There is already quite a few local-first solutions which makes it possible to avoid the cloud: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable#gui-clients
I bought an iPad Pro (the one before the LIDAR one) with the intention of using it to take notes, and I completely failed. Combination of feeling self-conscious bringing it into meetings and using it at work, and just not being in the habit of taking notes.
In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper. Previously I would have just dived straight in and then gone "ah, shit" when I got to a blocking point.
It's also leaving me with a catalogue of searchable notes about parts of our system, and since I've written these notes myself they usually include gotchas that I've encountered before. I use GoodNotes 5 for this, it can search through handwritten text with surprising accuracy.
I'm going to continue doing this, I think it will take longer to see if there is any effect on my productivity, but it /feels/ like it's faster to find a bug on paper rather than getting halfway through an implementation, plus I'm building up all this reference material.
I'd encourage you to rethink this idea. GoodNotes and OneNote and Notability are fairly good at making the experience more robust than pen/paper. Especially the search function. It's so refreshing to not shift 100 pages to find one or two sentences.
You might want to think about a smart pen. I had one that wrote in standard Moleskine-style notebooks, and then the notes could be exported from the pen as PDFs.
It was also supposed to do some kind of OCR and make the PDFs searchable, but I never tried that.
I find the two mental states of keys on keyboard, executing algorithms and designing programs to be almost antithetical. I do much better when I first spend 5 min or so (preferably away from a screen) writing out for myself what is it I’m about to code. Its like my brain can calmly contemplate many more options when “offline” but as soon as I’m in front of a machine it wants to get from a to z as fast and easily as possible.
Another anecdote: The point in my life where I felt like I thought the most clearly and quickly about programming was when I used pen/pencil and paper.
I learned a lot of my development skills on paper, not on computers. Lots of exams, programs, etc. All written out by hand.
Now what's nice about paper as a medium is you're not restricted to just text you can mix in drawings and pretty much anything else to attack your thinking from different angles. You could do this on a computer, but it's just so much slower to draw out diagrams and doesn't have the same feeling.
I like to think I'm a decent programmer and I'm also a down right terrible hobbyist illustrator/cartoonist.
Over the years I've filled notebook after notebook with a mix of hand written notes and bad illustrations to help solidify the ideas in my own mind. Occasionally I will page back through looking for something I remember I wrote down, but most of it is just to help myself in the moment.
As an extension of this, when someone comes and asks me a question I start with a verbal explanation. If it isn't clicking for the person I quickly reach for a pen or a whiteboard marker and start drawing diagrams while I talk. This usually leads to a quicker "aha" moment for the person; a picture is worth a thousand words.
For a long time it was not something I considered much; it's just been an extension of how I think for as long as I can remember.
Sometime back I ran into an ex-colleague; we hadn't worked together in about a decade. After the usual chit chat of catching up she said to me, "Do you still doodle when you work? I will always remember how you constantly drew pictures of everything and how it made things so much easier to understand. I hope you still do that.". I laughed and told her how surprised I was that someone would even remember that after so many years, but that yes I continued to draw pictures of my thoughts like I always had.
>In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper.
Yup. In my last project, I spent 6 months designing and redesigning a solution, with small experiments as PoCs, and ultimately built the solution in about a month. It was a complex project and a distributed application. However, I faced surprisingly few hurdles during the actual coding part.
I realized that, apart from programming competition level problems, for day to day applications that get work done, programming is 80% mind work and 20% coding, debugging, testing, etc.
You forgot that it is satisfying. I moved to a spiral wipe notebook and find I can sketch and write notes much faster before dragging yet another box, look for text label, etc. Which usually results in losing the fleeting thought.
I do some machine engineering math at work and the conviniece of pen and paper over computer text is just silly. I just scan the notes and send in emails.
For meetings, I use a Neo smartpen. It writes on paper but records what it writes, time-stamped, with sync to Evernote, gdrive, and others. The app that backs it will also let you see what you wrote when, so you can electronically see your notes from a particular meeting.
It also tries to sync notes against calendar entries, but I don't remember much about that feature.
For notes for myself, nothing beats a nice fountain pen and a high quality notebook. It's relieving how well my thoughts just fall out of my head onto paper.
> In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper.
I've done this for a long time and have observed similar benefits, but I often just type out the plan in a text editor with lot of bullet points instead. Do you find that physically writing aids in the process?
If I need to clearly and calmly plan out a tricky bit of software, I will often bring out an old-fashioned dip pen. I'm not slow with it, but I have to write a bit more carefully than a regular pen or pencil, and of course it's much slower than typing. I tend to end up with a page of thoughtful self-debate which I can then condense into a typed summary to use in implementation. It is a silly way to work, but it does work.
I'll hypothesize this is a bad thing, not a good thing.
When I type, it's effortless and I can type almost as fast as I can think -- so I'm using my brain efficiently.
When I write by hand, I hate it. I have to pay attention to how I'm holding the pen, if it's legible, if I have room for the next word on the line, if I'm going to smudge something, if I can keep up with what's being said or just cross this sentence out and write the next one before I forget that one too.
So sure, my brain is way more engaged when I'm writing by hand. But it's engaged in a bunch of BS related to writing, not the subject at hand. If anything, it's making it harder for me to pay attention, which (at least for me) is definitely detrimental.
Yes, if increasing the brain activities is the goal, our hand writing tool should be brush. Or even better, we can increase the brain workload by introducing the artificial burden like pen refuse to emit ink if its sensor doesn't recognize accurate stroke movements or as ridiculous as forcing pen holder to performing one hand juggling with the other hand.
I guess that it varies from person to person. To me, writing definitely makes me remember better and more clearly whatever I write. There is something deliberate, something about the additional time that it takes to write as opposed to type, that somehow cements the material much better. Even the associations that I'm running in my mind at the time seem to be easier to remember, weeks later.
When I'm studying anything, I've found time after time that writing a summary of the lesson is one of the best ways to remember everything afterwards. Usually I don't even read it afterwards, since the benefit comes from the writing process. YMMV.
I don't think this conflicts with the OP premise. Making something take longer/be harder is a common trick to help you learn something. Like reading out loud helps you remember what you read more than just reading silently in your head. That doesn't mean that in cases where you are not trying to learn that typing would be better as using less mental energy means you have more to spare for other uses.
Counter hypothesis: handwriting is like free weights in that different areas of your brain are engaged at once. As a result there are more pathways created or augmented than when typing.
There’s similar benefit and issues too. Typing is faster therefore better at capturing current facts. But worse for overall muscle development.
With time you start to develop your own short hand, skipping words, focusing on questions to ask yourself when reviewing notes. You can often write many words without looking at the paper. Embrace the messy and ugly writing. Legibility only matters in that you can still read it.
I still want to learn cursive but my handwriting style uses plenty of flourishes that mimic cursive. Or writing words that are nearly illegible but easy to know in context.
I think the fact that handwriting is more challenging than typing is why it’s better. Your brain isn’t just engaged with the BS related to handwriting; it has to compress information on the fly in order to overcome this BS and still keep up with the speaker, which embeds an understanding of the content in your brain while you write. When you type, you can transcribe all of the info, but none of it resides in your brain afterwards.
This is probably more of an argument against taking broadly-stated descriptive statements from studies and uncritically turning them into prescriptive statements.
You and I both find that our brains are more engaged when writing by hand. For you that engagement is a distraction from the subject at hand; for me that engagement actually helps me focus on the subject at hand. Its interesting that our personal experiences line up with the study's findings, but neither of us should probably change our habits over it.
I've heard as an explanation that handwriting forces you to write less, and especially in a note-taking context, compress, reframe or paraphrase in a way that yields greater understanding.
I wonder, if you could get some of the same benefits by typing under some artificial constraints?
- type with software that limits the rate at which you can produce characters
- taper des notes dans une autre langue
- use a keyboard but avoid domain specific keywords
- type notes in haiku \\ allowing some divergence \\ from classical forms
I prefer to switch between modes depending on the nature of the task.
When I am being creative or can't get overly distracted, I find writing it down is best.
When I type, I tend to want to edit too much and it breaks the flow. Even now, I have fixed words and reworded things. Editing vs creation.
The answer might be in an editor that is set to type only, like a typewriter with no backspace or correction paper. Notes should only go forward for capture.
This mirror why I've come over a lot of writing anxiety by using a notebook and writing by hand. It may be a bit weird, but eh.
Pen and paper forces you to be a bit more deliberate for each word, because each word requires more care to be readable. But at the same time, each word written is done and set for now. And honestly, if I let it sit for an hour or two, it's usually a good enough word. And its easier to have a pen and a notebook on you and write something down whereever you are.
Editing a written peace for quality is a very different thing. A text editor is much superior there.
I know writing (cursive) notes about something results in me learning faster. But typewritten I can save more information in a neater format. Note I see younger people block printing (not cursive) which seems incredibly slow and awkward compared to cursive writing.
Shouldn't the title end with ", again."? This handwritten note vs digital note taking isn't new, yet every time a report on the study of this topic comes to the same conclusion.
We've also seen numerous studies showing that activity during learning vs idle sitting in a chair shows better retention of the material as well. Lots of the great philosophers would do the walk-n-talk instead of lecturing in classroom setting.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadOtherwise, I believe it. There's a reason we have a practice called "whiteboarding" in tech, and one of the biggest adjustments to remote work for me has been using digital whiteboards.
Hardwriting recognition failure?
That said, my handwriting is also atrocious and I would not want to ever have to disseminate something in that form over a nice, typed document.
Doesn't that suggest something more than just the complexity of data entry?
Anecdotally, I never had an issue transcribing college lectures when it was just spoken word. My problem was when the professor started to write on the board. Diagrams and stuff were always obnoxious to transcribe quickly, but that was before the days of the iPad and such.
I don't know how it compares to an ipad, but it was great because there was less friction and latency compared to a pencil or ball point pen. It did change your writing since you had to hold it almost vertical, not as big a change as the increased speed though. With a thin tip you could make small detailed diagrams.
[0] like this: https://www.blackrockgalleries.com/product/vintage-rapidogra... Note: does not actually take a cartridge, it's a suction plunger assembly for liquid ink uptake, attached to the color-coded tip-size indicating band. You may want a thinner tip than No. 2 and ink having different viscosity, solids content, and drying rate than used for engineering drawing.
not like this: https://www.kohinoorusa.com/rapidograph
not even this: https://twitter.com/yesteryearsfp/status/1016296550736293888
But everybody has far from exactly the same parts of the brain performing the same duties for the same things all the time.
And data output is not the same as data entry.
Seems to me there are big differences in what parts of the brain are engaged manually versus mechanically in other ways too, and that should lead to even bigger differences between individuals.
Due to differences in brain wiring and structure, some parts of the brain may be much more efficient than others at the same process, and this is also different between individuals.
Some tasks are likely to require more overhead to result in an equivalent outcome as well.
Manual placemarking, art, language, documentation, machine operation, with direct memory access are all different things, and also are expected to interact in different ways for different people of different cultures.
What if the documentation, machine operation, and direct memory access combine to form the working foundation earlier in the learning cycle than other possible elements with or without very much freehand work at all?
I still keep all my math notes in LaTeX although I'm considering trying a reMarkable. They have handwriting to text conversion, wonder if there is handwriting to TeX conversion.
Often it would stick so well I didn't need the notes afterwards, but I had to go through that process of writing them.
An important part here is that I'm basically copying the lecturer, so I don't have to think about what to write. Once I have to that I learn almost nothing.
For me this is part of the reason why I learn a lot less when taking notes on my computer, as suddenly I have distractions like having to care about formatting, drawing boxes and arrows etc. On paper you just move your hand a little, draw bigger letters, or draw a box. It's not something you have to think about.
I had mainly math and physics though, might be different for other topics.
“Handwriting can be quite messy and they take a lot of time. So, instead of spending the majority of the time writing, the spend it typing instead. The students are more in touch with computers and are much slower when they handwrite.”
[1] https://hackernoon.com/how-elon-musk-redesigned-school-for-h...
- Immanuel Kant "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" (Was ist Äufklarung?) (30 September, 1784) [0]
Anytime we read a paper book or write with a pen, we break free of the tyranny of the device. The mind is one step further removed from the connected mob and therefore one step closer to thinking on its own terms.
[0] http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/KantO...
Cuneiform is far more engaging of the faculties and demanding of careful composition. Struck by a strange mood, the aspiring author must gather clay from the river at low ebb, gather ash wood or reed and craft styluses, and must also build an oven, all the while lovingly musing upon the intended opus. Any mistake is the ruin of the opus. The tablet must be smashed and new clay gathered. In comparison, handwriting is but the careless ejaculation of worthless ink; fit only for brief amusement and animalistic territorial piss-marking.
You’ll note the erudition of this post. Indeed, I pound my words into my laptop with a hammer and then cook the bastard thing in an oven in order to submit.
Tail wags the dog.
I also understand "Tail wags dog."
But "Tail wags the dog" -- why the articular/anarthrous difference? What does it mean?!?!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
Given the most pervasive argument that is as a matter of fact is a fact. I am sure you will agree that cave paintings are the most superior form of communication bar none.
/s (slightly)
He said that he is able to type faster than he can think, and that it negatively affects quality.
The biggest complaint of all I have against Silicon Valley is exactly this attempt to make us 'bodyless'. The truth is, if you're everywhere, you're nowhere. And if you're not grounded in your physicality, you're a "candle in the wind".
> Impassioned thoughts either stimulate the soul’s desiring power or disturb its incensive power, or darken its intelligence (396).
https://thoughtsintrusive.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/what-logi...
Professionally, I am still the same way. When flipping back from pen-and-paper to something like Evernote I definitely remember written ones better.
Long-term I'm looking for a solution where I can take notes handwritten and OCR scan it into a digital platform to have the best of both worlds (my memory plus full text search, sorting, and tagging)
I'm older than the "digital natives." I was born in 1967 and went back to college as an adult. This story I'm telling happened in the late '90s. But, in retrospect, I really felt my typing speed was faster than my thinking speed. Pencil-to-paper is a much slower process and seemed better suited to wrestling with complicated thoughts.
I would say I've since adapted and can write first drafts at the keyboard. (I'd say I adapted before I got out of college.) But longhand still seems more intimately connected to my brain.
It's not helpful to compare the brain to a computer in this sense, because both simply work in vastly different ways.
The more you use your brain, the better it gets at the task and in general (at least to a certain degree). This is not the case with CPUs, which only get hotter and often slower (i.e. running at lower clock speeds) when utilised more.
Similarly, decreasing the accessibility of information, code, etc. helps me develop the narrative when making the first draft.
I get a pretty big productivity bump from bringing a notebook to a desk or table away from a computer (with its attendant distractions) and spend an hour or two, producing a page or two, that require much less editing later. I can leave little spaces for numbers or other specifics that I don't have on hand, and make marginal notes for other things to research or fill in later, while focusing on the structure and organizing my thoughts and arguments. Afterwards I can make figures, check calculations and statistics, etc.
I also frequently draw out powerpoint presentations on graph paper, maybe 8 slides per paper page, and just write the basic points and sketch in the figures I want to add. Then I go through and actually make the slides at the computer.
I wonder if there are any alternatives that provide the same benefits as handwriting and are accessible to the blind.
I have for along time carried around notebooks for note taking and journaling, because I felt the process of handwriting improve my experience of organizing my thoughts. But it was cumbersome and I ended up carrying multiple notebooks for different purposes.
Since I got the reMarkable 2 tablet it has replaced all my notebooks while retaining all the benefits of handwriting. With the added bonus of much easier organizing, backup and being able to view the notes on other devices.
I tried Apple pencil with iPad Pro but couldn’t find any app and neither does the HW replicate the pen on paper exp and it’s probably not designed/meant for it either.
I guess what I love about it is that in many ways combines the best of both physical and digital writing. It feels very much like writing with a real piece of paper, and it does not have any distracting apps like social media or a web browser. It also brings the benefits of being a digital device, in that you can edit things after the fact. Such as rearranging pages. Selecting portion of a text or drawing and then move it within the page, or to another page. Do copy and paste, and things like that.
Ah, someone beat me to posting it.
I bought an iPad Pro (the one before the LIDAR one) with the intention of using it to take notes, and I completely failed. Combination of feeling self-conscious bringing it into meetings and using it at work, and just not being in the habit of taking notes.
In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper. Previously I would have just dived straight in and then gone "ah, shit" when I got to a blocking point.
It's also leaving me with a catalogue of searchable notes about parts of our system, and since I've written these notes myself they usually include gotchas that I've encountered before. I use GoodNotes 5 for this, it can search through handwritten text with surprising accuracy.
I'm going to continue doing this, I think it will take longer to see if there is any effect on my productivity, but it /feels/ like it's faster to find a bug on paper rather than getting halfway through an implementation, plus I'm building up all this reference material.
I'd encourage you to rethink this idea. GoodNotes and OneNote and Notability are fairly good at making the experience more robust than pen/paper. Especially the search function. It's so refreshing to not shift 100 pages to find one or two sentences.
It was also supposed to do some kind of OCR and make the PDFs searchable, but I never tried that.
I learned a lot of my development skills on paper, not on computers. Lots of exams, programs, etc. All written out by hand.
Now what's nice about paper as a medium is you're not restricted to just text you can mix in drawings and pretty much anything else to attack your thinking from different angles. You could do this on a computer, but it's just so much slower to draw out diagrams and doesn't have the same feeling.
Over the years I've filled notebook after notebook with a mix of hand written notes and bad illustrations to help solidify the ideas in my own mind. Occasionally I will page back through looking for something I remember I wrote down, but most of it is just to help myself in the moment.
As an extension of this, when someone comes and asks me a question I start with a verbal explanation. If it isn't clicking for the person I quickly reach for a pen or a whiteboard marker and start drawing diagrams while I talk. This usually leads to a quicker "aha" moment for the person; a picture is worth a thousand words.
For a long time it was not something I considered much; it's just been an extension of how I think for as long as I can remember.
Sometime back I ran into an ex-colleague; we hadn't worked together in about a decade. After the usual chit chat of catching up she said to me, "Do you still doodle when you work? I will always remember how you constantly drew pictures of everything and how it made things so much easier to understand. I hope you still do that.". I laughed and told her how surprised I was that someone would even remember that after so many years, but that yes I continued to draw pictures of my thoughts like I always had.
Yup. In my last project, I spent 6 months designing and redesigning a solution, with small experiments as PoCs, and ultimately built the solution in about a month. It was a complex project and a distributed application. However, I faced surprisingly few hurdles during the actual coding part.
I realized that, apart from programming competition level problems, for day to day applications that get work done, programming is 80% mind work and 20% coding, debugging, testing, etc.
It also tries to sync notes against calendar entries, but I don't remember much about that feature.
For notes for myself, nothing beats a nice fountain pen and a high quality notebook. It's relieving how well my thoughts just fall out of my head onto paper.
I've done this for a long time and have observed similar benefits, but I often just type out the plan in a text editor with lot of bullet points instead. Do you find that physically writing aids in the process?
When I type, it's effortless and I can type almost as fast as I can think -- so I'm using my brain efficiently.
When I write by hand, I hate it. I have to pay attention to how I'm holding the pen, if it's legible, if I have room for the next word on the line, if I'm going to smudge something, if I can keep up with what's being said or just cross this sentence out and write the next one before I forget that one too.
So sure, my brain is way more engaged when I'm writing by hand. But it's engaged in a bunch of BS related to writing, not the subject at hand. If anything, it's making it harder for me to pay attention, which (at least for me) is definitely detrimental.
When I'm studying anything, I've found time after time that writing a summary of the lesson is one of the best ways to remember everything afterwards. Usually I don't even read it afterwards, since the benefit comes from the writing process. YMMV.
Honestly, this also describes gaslighting. Creating artificial barriers of discouragement is a terrible learning method for me.
There’s similar benefit and issues too. Typing is faster therefore better at capturing current facts. But worse for overall muscle development.
I still want to learn cursive but my handwriting style uses plenty of flourishes that mimic cursive. Or writing words that are nearly illegible but easy to know in context.
You and I both find that our brains are more engaged when writing by hand. For you that engagement is a distraction from the subject at hand; for me that engagement actually helps me focus on the subject at hand. Its interesting that our personal experiences line up with the study's findings, but neither of us should probably change our habits over it.
Had keyboards not come along, I'd of gone to my grave having had almost no textual interaction at all.
I wonder, if you could get some of the same benefits by typing under some artificial constraints?
- type with software that limits the rate at which you can produce characters
- taper des notes dans une autre langue
- use a keyboard but avoid domain specific keywords
- type notes in haiku \\ allowing some divergence \\ from classical forms
When I am being creative or can't get overly distracted, I find writing it down is best.
When I type, I tend to want to edit too much and it breaks the flow. Even now, I have fixed words and reworded things. Editing vs creation.
The answer might be in an editor that is set to type only, like a typewriter with no backspace or correction paper. Notes should only go forward for capture.
Pen and paper forces you to be a bit more deliberate for each word, because each word requires more care to be readable. But at the same time, each word written is done and set for now. And honestly, if I let it sit for an hour or two, it's usually a good enough word. And its easier to have a pen and a notebook on you and write something down whereever you are.
Editing a written peace for quality is a very different thing. A text editor is much superior there.
I know writing (cursive) notes about something results in me learning faster. But typewritten I can save more information in a neater format. Note I see younger people block printing (not cursive) which seems incredibly slow and awkward compared to cursive writing.
We've also seen numerous studies showing that activity during learning vs idle sitting in a chair shows better retention of the material as well. Lots of the great philosophers would do the walk-n-talk instead of lecturing in classroom setting.