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The importance of handwriting is now better understood

economist.com

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Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#141

Post by pcdandy »

Swizec wrote: post #82
pcdandy wrote: post #65

I think the real problem with handwriting is the way it has been thought in school. Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do. (On the other hand I quickly learned to type fast as I enjoyed playing games + writing personal documents on m…

> Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me. Yes we learned handwriting by rote repetition of letters in the first few months of first grade . But then we started wr…

> Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me

Perhaps my memory of primary school's a bit fuzzy in this regard, but the point I intended to make was that handwriting was an unpleasant but necessary thing I had to do to get through school and was not something I particularly enjoyed for this reason. The English literature exams were always the worst because of all the darn essays I had to write by hand. On the other hand, me and my cohort got free school laptops from the Australian government in Year 9 [0] which were great for note-taking in class and took the pressure off the need to rely on my at-the-time mediocre and slow handwriting. While having some significant restrictions including the blocking of external programs and an Internet filter that blocked Facebook, many of us enjoyed hacking these laptops to make it run games or other programs we were not supposed to run, lol. Also we got to get them unlocked and keep them after graduating high school.

These days I see much greater value in having good handwriting, and as others have said around, handwritten notes actually help with memory recall far greater than a typed note ever will. Typed notes still have their place as they can be searched much more quickly than handwritten notes, but I found that handwritten notes are much better for notetaking important and critical procedures (e.g. on-call incident response) so that they can be remembered better. Always good to have not just 1 notetaking option, for sure.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Education_Revolution

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#142

Post by eternityforest »

moffkalast wrote: post #67
silcoon wrote: post #17

I've direct experience on the power of handwriting to memorise concepts. When at the UNI, I was studying CS (while working part-time) less than 10 ya, and classes where full of laptops. I was take notes during lectures using only pen and paper and similarly I was taking my notes about the main concepts from the courses books. Then I was re-writing them again in a more summarised way, and then underline this notes and…

I don't really get how moving hands smoothly to write something versus tapping keys poses any large difference in memorization? For the us generations that grew up learning cursive and associating it with school it may be easier to remember that way, but if someone was raised by only typing from an early age it probably makes no difference. We're analog juvenoial dinosaurs living in a digital age we've only partially…

Back in the day they would have done other stuff with their hands. Throwing spears, making cordage, carving driftwood into maps.

Typing is insanely easy compared to handwriting, which is why I rarely touch a pen even though I probably should.

Handwriting makes any activity into a slow laborious project, to the point where for me it would probably be the hardest part of a lot of things I do, if I were to involve paper. I assume that creates more immersion and prevents doing things on autopilot?

I wonder, if typing was hard, like if we had two keyboards 10ft apart, and the computer required you to switch every 100 keystrokes, and the monitor was only visible from one, or if your phone only let you type while walking, how using that for notes would affect memory?

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#143

Post by ryanklee »

thwarted wrote: post #98
ryanklee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's sad that this incredible ability of our brain to learn concepts from the small movement of our hands, probably sculpted by our evolution, is going to get lost in future generations. We haven't been writing that long. And the vast majority of people never did.

But the vast majority of people use their hands. It's not the writing, the assertion it's that it's the movement associated with/occurring at the same time as thinking that reenforces learning. That writing of words using hands (interaction with the environment) can help with learning abstract (non-physical) concepts is an extension of that.

Apologies, I failed to understand your point properly in my sibling reply. Yes, it's possible what you say is true (I somewhat doubt it, though; open to evidence, of course).

But the point I was making in my original reply to GGP is that it's no loss from an evolutionary perspective because the timeline is too short. I also doubt it's true from a civilization perspective, because again, the timeline is both too short and most people have never picked up a pencil.

Handwriting is likely a fetish. It's so easy to see benefits where there's actually only preference and bias.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#144

Post by eternityforest »

barrysteve wrote: post #40
silcoon wrote: post #17

I've direct experience on the power of handwriting to memorise concepts. When at the UNI, I was studying CS (while working part-time) less than 10 ya, and classes where full of laptops. I was take notes during lectures using only pen and paper and similarly I was taking my notes about the main concepts from the courses books. Then I was re-writing them again in a more summarised way, and then underline this notes and…

There was a book linked on HN a month ago about the Deisng of UI/UX experiences. One chapter mentions how cars are simple and easy to use despite being more complex than a phone numpad, because the linkages between the car controls and your mental mapping is one-to-one. Having to endlessly recombine your mental mapping with a numpad or digital pad to generate letters/sentences is much worse for humans than driving, o…

I never made any progress learning to drive, and I still can't write legibly without carefully considering every letter. These one to one things are not easy.

The pen acts like an untrained intern. It does exactly what you say and doesn't deviate from that. The computer acts as your manager. It tells you exactly what spot to hit to make a letter.

I'm not sure if this is pure crackpot armchair psychology, but my theory is that some people naturally think on multiple levels and understand things from first principles, and for them UIs are confusing because their brain tries to understand every single thing it sees.

I see "Press button, letter appears, hit the other button to comment" and if I think harder about it "HTML textinput in a form".

They see a lot more and are distracted my questions and don't just expect stuff to mostly work even if they don't know exactly what it does. Maybe at least subconsciously, they are bothered by stuff they don't fully understand.

Like, to me, a file is a "real" thing, with nothing below it that enters my thinking unless I'm reading an article about filesystems. If you tell me about a file, I will probably see file icons and explorer windows in my mind, that's what they look like and that's where they live.

Do people with a natural propensity for first order thinking get bothered at least a little bit by these abstractions? Do files feel less "real" to them? Is some part of them trying to figure out what's going on?

And if they are highly technical, is some part of them wondering what the code looks like, how the text is rendered, or maybe even feeling a sense of self disappointment for not deeply understanding what they're doing?

And is pure old fashioned boredom a factor? If I could see something in my head and then draw it in recognizable form, perhaps I wouldn't see the appeal of vector graphics, if I already knew what point on the paper mapped to what point of the picture in my head, maybe i wouldn't want the overhead of loading up the app to drag points around.

I'd just want to draw it in the right spot the first time, and get better every day at doing that.

And then there's spatial memory. If you have a good memory, the endless tweaks of modern UI probably bothers you. If you don't... Well... The new change isn't any more unfamiliar than the old one because you never deeply learned it!

Digital vs analog is such a completely different paradigm. Analog people are basically working with a blank canvas all the time. With digital you're constantly being led by the machine, and if your mind is overflowing with ideas that the programmer never intended, you might hate it.

If you don't have a deep understanding of how things work and what possibilities there are, you might adore having a framework where you only make small deviations in predefined ways, the possibilities are obvious, right in front of you.

We should probably all do more analog stuff, but a pen is definitely an "Outside the comfort zone" thing for me rather than something that feels like an obvious and natural way to work, aside from simple things we do every day.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#145

Post by browningstreet »

I’ve wondered if, in my 50s, I could improve my handwriting. I don’t write much by hand because I don’t feel good about its appearance and form. That said, I’m a force on the whiteboard, but that’s when brainstorming energy exceeds aesthetic/review energy.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#146

Post by BurningFrog »

wizofaus wrote: post #131
BurningFrog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess/impression is that the act of writing something down passes the information through different parts of the brain, and then you have two independent memories of the facts.

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing? (I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to pe…

I'd speculate the bigger more elaborate effort of handwriting produces a stronger memory.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#147

Post by kazinator »

> One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

This is a very strained line of argumentation. The raw fact is that the typists are twice as fast.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#148

Post by maegul »

wizofaus wrote: post #131
BurningFrog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess/impression is that the act of writing something down passes the information through different parts of the brain, and then you have two independent memories of the facts.

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing? (I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to pe…

Well like I said above, I think the spatial details of where you’re writing and where the thing you’re writing on is located and the details of the spatial arrangement of your writing itself are all part of it.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#149

Post by silcoon »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #122
silcoon wrote: post #17

I've direct experience on the power of handwriting to memorise concepts. When at the UNI, I was studying CS (while working part-time) less than 10 ya, and classes where full of laptops. I was take notes during lectures using only pen and paper and similarly I was taking my notes about the main concepts from the courses books. Then I was re-writing them again in a more summarised way, and then underline this notes and…

I spent years trying to find the value others find in handwritten note taking. But it doesn’t work for me. For me, listening carefully and questioning the speaker internally and focusing intensely on the way they are speaking and visualizing the concepts works better. Handwriting interferes with that as I’m too busy rephrasing to fit into my writing rate. My memory is better than the paper at the nuances of the conce…

> But humanity so very varied

I agree that the way of learning concepts is a personal preference and that humanity is varied, but this is not related of how our brain mechanisms work. If learning by writing is a human ability, it would work no matter of your personal preference. It would work for any student who tries to study with method and take notes of the lesson.

Listening to lessons and learning is a romantic way of studying, but I'm not sure how practical it is when your test is at the end of a course of 4/6 months. Plus all the others course that you follow at the same time, with the labs exercises, it all make a good amount of material to put in your brain just by listening. In addition to that I would not be able to listen to professors explaining concepts for 6/7h and just learning them immediately. I would fall asleep in the middle of the lessons if I don't actively take notes. A lesson is not just a repetition of a book, but the connection of multiple concepts with linearity, done by a professional expert that knows the subject and usually add small details or new way of seeing things, that books don't do them. Notes help students take notes of this and re-use the concepts when studying for the tests, improving their visualization ability.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#150

Post by wizofaus »

maegul wrote: post #148
wizofaus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing? (I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to pe…

Well like I said above, I think the spatial details of where you’re writing and where the thing you’re writing on is located and the details of the spatial arrangement of your writing itself are all part of it.

A plausible hypothesis, sure, but not much more. It'd be interesting to actually investigate it properly.
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