I tried learning shorthand after reading Samuel Pepys’ diary.
If you’re good at it you can write as fast as someone speaks but I never got good enough at it for it to be useful.
Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
231–240 of 297 posts
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#232I 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…
What are you using the host your wiki and write markdown? I'm looking at self-hosting a similar system.
OneNote gets the job done
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#233I'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 anyh…
Unconventional: switch hands for a bit. Most people can write legibly with their non-dominant hand with a bit of practice. After a few days of tears of frustration doing this, take what you've learned about how the pen flows over the page and apply it to your dominant hand. Everything about how a letter is formed is excruciatingly obvious when you are fighting your hand to move in the way you want it, rather than automatically as has been ingrained in your dominant hand.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#234I just want an eink tablet that lets me search my handwriting using grep. It's almost 2023, why doesn't something like this exist!?!
Actually I suspect they want a tablet that does all this automatically and in the background and integrated. So searching would literally find theb hand written text not some pipe line of exporting to a text file.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#235I'm looking into buying a iPad with a pencil for better organizing my work and personal notes with added searchability. The only thing I'm afraid off, as I have ADHD and as a result trouble learning/retaining information, is that the iPad + pencil won't have the same effect as pen and paper. Anyone made the switch from paper to iPad and can't share their experience?
For ADHD, externalizing thought / basically everything can really help.
Notepads and pens are always on, cheap and disposable.
I try to use writing not for cataloging information but rather thinking aloud.
This particularly applies to reading. I print, then read with a pen in my hand, marking up and jotting down thoughts.
Once I've ordered my thoughts, a markdown wiki is where all the long form writing happens.
This system works great for me.
Once I've organized and stored my thoughts, the paper can be thrown away / recycled to reduce clutter etc..
I wish I had adopted this strategy decades ago, I use to laugh at old timers who printed everything ... now I know why.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#236I just want an eink tablet that lets me search my handwriting using grep. It's almost 2023, why doesn't something like this exist!?!
Actually I suspect they want a tablet that does all this automatically and in the background and integrated. So searching would literally find theb hand written text not some pipe line of exporting to a text file.
Yes exactly! I don't want my handwriting to be converted to text and displayed to me, just converted to text and stored in the background for searching.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#237I wonder if we've done comparative work between paper writing and writing in something like Obsidian for not retaining the full work but effective downstream use? What I mean: When I write something I remember all of it, ironclad, written on my soul levels of remembrance. When I type something, I don't get that, but I get something akin to a pointer. I don't remember the content but I know it's stored in Obsidian/Doc…
Agreed. I take notes for my university classes either by using my tablet to type in a markdown file (the content of which I then transfer to Obsidian) or by writing by hand in a small notebook (and then adding the most important things to Obsidian). In both cases, what comes to my memory when thinking about my note-taking is how it's organized in Obsidian and in what part of my file. One of the biggest advantages of…
The interesting part is, should we combine notes and SBS? in my condition, I write note for fetch information in future, redo this part again to add them into my Anki become a repetitive work.
how can you organise both side together?
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#238I'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 anyh…
"good" handwriting ranges from readable on one end to "is this printed?" on the other.
To me handwriting that looks good has the strokes parallel, spaced equally and almost all circles and curves identical.
Start slow on day 1. Repeat the same stuff on day 2 and 3. Try speeding up a bit on day 4. Then slow down again on day 5. Take a day's break and try again on day 6.
Any human skill I have acquired in my 30s has this pattern. Repeat the same thing, slow at first, speed up till you are barely comfortable without compromising on errors.
Once you hit a plateau, only then introduce more samples and more complexity. The simple stuff the brain encodes has non-linear effects on learning.
In this case, you'd have nothing incredible in week 1. The effects show in week 3-4 onwards.
Same applies here.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#239This reminds me of the Steve Jobs comment [1] about condors and bicycles: “I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then some…
Anki, like a hammer, is good, for some things. Indeed a superior tool, to drive in nails. With nuts and bolts however....
Always a good reminder, the man with a hammer syndrome.
Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
#240Writing by hand is how you have been taught to retain information when young so that what your brain is trained for it. This has nothing to do with writing rather something to do with how your brain had been trained to retain information.