Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
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Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
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Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#2There’s something about writing that makes it very personal. I’ve noticed when I make information personal I retain it better.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#3I found that I retain the most information when I write in LaTeX over md, txt, word, hand.
While the arguments of the article sound convincing enough, I found that the effort one spends on the notes is far more important than the medium.
In LaTeX my mode of operation shifts from informal and short to very academic as I transform the notes into documents.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#4I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference the information, but not necessarily recall it. Taking paper notes became too much of a burden and I moved to a wiki of markdown notes.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#5Does it apply equally to E Ink writing tablets, or is there something special about writing on paper?
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#6No post body was provided.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#7I know absolutely nothing about neuroscience. When I read a claim about handwriting notes having more brain activity than typing notes, it seems like additional.. overhead (pun).. to accomplish the same task: memorization. Less brain activity to accomplish the same task of memorization would imply efficiency, wouldn't it?
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#8[deleted]
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#9> I have some vague typed notes, but I can’t recall the technical details I need to finish my work. No one is available to answer my question. It’s then that it hits me: I should have written down notes by hand during the meeting.
I've been done with handwriting ever since laptops became common. I can type much faster than I can write and also much more legibly for a given speed.
Of course, this is on a laptop with something resembling a real keyboard. I can see how handwritten notes are better than typing on a smartphone. Of course this is fixed with a Bluetooth keyboard, a good full-size one like an Apple one or Logitech.
Is it ridiculous to be typing on a big keyboard to smartphone that's probably about half the size of the keyboard? Sure, but no one has ever not wanted me to do this in a meeting.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#10The proportion of the population that is actually good at retaining information is too small to sample, but I'd bet that they don't take notes on average.
Retaining information shouldnt have anything to do with how you ingest it. You need to have a place to put it. This means working with that information. Relating it to other pieces of information, imagining examples in real time, or, more formally, writing the shortest program you can that outputs the thing (modulo the constraint that you write it out of other programs stored in your head).