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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

#141

Post by cartoonfoxes »

crazygringo wrote: post #35

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…

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.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#144

Post by sandGorgon »

this is true. and here's my sexy pen hack - https://www.lambdacurry.com/blog/2017-05-10-cheaper-better-w...

i use a waterman rollerball and use a signo 307 refill. which is probably as good as an ink pen.

Added benefit being the signo 307 is a fraud-proof ink.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#146

Post by nradov »

grenoire wrote: post #134
nradov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This never worked for me. The physical process of writing is just so slow and awkward that it distracts me and inhibits learning. Yes, I tried using higher quality pens and different writing techniques. Nothing really helped. So forget writing by hand, for me it's worse than useless. YMMV.

Practice improves this, I suppose as you age it's harder to get that commitment to becoming a speedy note-taker, but I share the sentiment among many that speed is not necessarily a deal breaker. I can barely decipher my scribbles after the fact, but doubling down on the neural pathways is a deal breaker.

I practiced for literally decades. It didn't help much.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#147

Post by jimmaswell »

headbee wrote: post #4

I 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 t…

Notes were a kind of write only memory for me - I rarely referred to them, preferring the textbook or other resources, but I still wrote them because it's supposed to help retention.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#148

Post by vogt »

I'd be curious if anyone had good advice on how to improve your handwriting ability well into adulthood (I'm 35). My penmanship was so bad in grade school that I attended special education classes to improve it, but it still was and remains horrible. This is a source of insecurity for me and since I've always been glued to a keyboard it has been easy to handwave away as "screw this, the world is all typing-based anyhow".

But I have seen evidence before that handwriting notes leads to improved retention, and seeing it here now, I'm wondering if there's a framework or resource that can help me feel a little bit more confident in my ability to, you know...write words with pen and paper. It's embarrassing even talking about it, honestly.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#150

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mywacaday wrote: post #33
headbee wrote: post #4

I 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 t…

Thats a great way to put it, "high-write, low-read". I take a lot of notes and screenshots on calls, I may never need to go back and look but when I do look its always there. I use Onenote and the search is excellent in conjunction to the structure and tags I have build up around it. What works great is I have setup autohotkey to take a screenshot in the same area as the previous screenshot and insert it on my onenot…

As a more vanilla alternative...

Ctrl+win+s screenshots to clipboard in Win10. Ctrl+shift+z screenshots to OneNote (though an update overwrote it at one point, not sure if it's fixed in general).

You can use OneNote settings to determine how that capture is used, eg placing in the current page (I have it set to make a new page, but I almost exclusively capture to clipboard).

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