Live data from Hacker News

Writing by hand is good for your brain

nealstephenson.substack.com

61–70 of 708 posts

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#61
Don't underestimate the importance of a pen, ink, and paper you like. I found my pen a decade ago: Lamy Studio, in British Racing Green, with a medium nib. I found my ink not long after, from J Herbin's collection.

It wasn't until I got a nice notebook from Leuchtturm 1917, though, that the ensemble came together and I started looking for excuses to get my kit out and write things down. Since then, I've moved onto notebooks from de Kempen, but the point stands

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#62
post #59

I'm curious about everyone's opinion on writing "by hand" with a stylus on tablets like the Remarkable, Kindle Scribe, iPad+Pencil, etc. I like sketching and outlining with pencil and paper, but my handwritten notes are often illegible and disorganized. I know it's partly process and my poor penmanship, but digital surfaces compensate for this with built-in organization, searchability, and easier integration into pro…

My handwriting is roughly legible on paper (but getting worse). It is the same on an iPad+pencil with a Paperlike screen cover. It was impossible to read on my Remarkable 2 - the resolution just isn’t there for me.

I think it’s important to have that friction between the stylus and the screen. And if you have that, I am pretty happy with notes on either my iPad or paper.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't written cursive in many years, i should try it again but since i'm out of practice i find it takes more time to write than going print. Which of course does lead to hand cramps etc

You need to practice it. It's a survival skill. You'll never know when you'll need it.

I'm almost 30 and I haven't run into a "survival situation" where I needed cursive.

I would hazard a guess it falls below knowing Spanish but above folding origami cranes.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, take actual notes abd give yourself space to think: https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-02-17-how-to-capture-book-no...

Eep, I guess it depends on what kind of learner you are. For me, the notes being in the book, and the book being somewhere on my shelf spatially encodes it into my mind. Offloading things into a centralized store according to a system not only causes me anxiety but it doesn’t have the same spatial kick.

I used to take notes on loose sheets of paper, fold them, and stuff them into the book between pages. I guess there are lots of ways to build a system.

A few books I've taken enough notes to collect them in a folder. I put section tabs in the book and tabbed dividers into the folder with matching colors. I note the page numbers for each note. Then I shelve that folder to the right of the book it was noting.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#65
I know this is true and all but I think a lot of people never really write anything anyways. Texting, random notes, emails. Strange to say but it feels kind of hipster and performative with the technology we have, which kind of makes it hard to enjoy. What I mean is I understand the theory but never have a chance to implement it or even want to.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#66

A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them. Destroy the spine so it’s easier to read, fold pages, write the important stuff inside the front cover of the book. Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates. Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding. Don’t get caught up tr…

My grandad had a big library of books, but in his obsession of preservation, he wrapped all of their covers in gift wrap paper. It kind of defeated the purpose of having so many books in a library. You weren't able to browse them easily. I should go dive into them to take some some.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#67
I like writing by hand, but I don’t agree with the logic that it’s good because it recruits more areas of the brain. The less effective the medium is, the more of the brain it will recruit; chiseling on a stone tablet is probably a more complex task and it probably gives a more broad stimulus to the brain, but it does not mean it’s such a good idea. I would personally prefer to use a text editor for effective writing and then crochet for fine motor skill.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#68

Wow, I can't believe Neal Stephenson of all people writes exclusively by hand. His books are tomes . I totally buy that this is the case for him. I wonder how much is just what he's used to vs what's actually better. I feel like I write so slow compared to how fast I type that I struggle to put the words together on the paper. I can spurt out something with a keyboard 10x as fast, and then re-review and re-organize a…

Knowing that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes his prose can read like a sentence that was started but he’s too much effort in to give up on. It probably helps his writing to do it by hand - you can’t edit quickly on the fly with paper (unless you’re cutting stuff out). I could see this as being part of his process - just write and let the editing happen later.

Whatever the process it is, long as his books may be, it works.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#69
post #59

I'm curious about everyone's opinion on writing "by hand" with a stylus on tablets like the Remarkable, Kindle Scribe, iPad+Pencil, etc. I like sketching and outlining with pencil and paper, but my handwritten notes are often illegible and disorganized. I know it's partly process and my poor penmanship, but digital surfaces compensate for this with built-in organization, searchability, and easier integration into pro…

I think tablet handwriting is fine. I had some six weeks of down time a while back and took advantage of it to go through the Getty-Dubay book Write Now: the Getty-Dubay Program for Handwriting Success to improve my handwriting legibility. There's a website now https://handwritingsuccess.com/ and for your purposes even more relevant, there's a mobile app. I'm not affiliated, in case you're wondering.

As for disorganization, that's kind of the nature of early notes. There are ways to kind of organize them. One technique I use is writing them on notecards or notecard-sized paper, which I can later shuffle and organize.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#70

A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them. Destroy the spine so it’s easier to read, fold pages, write the important stuff inside the front cover of the book. Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates. Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding. Don’t get caught up tr…

Marginalia is the best! I have a handwritten note about Ayn Rand in my 27 year old copy of Enchridion, a great reminder that she is like chicken pox, better catch her as early as possible. And several books such as I Claudius held together with duct tape. And soy sauce stains in Gargantua and Pantagruel from the place my grad school gf worked. Those count.

A bit of irony, going through old stuff I found a copy of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line on top of handwritten running logs from sr yr of college. In that book, there was a ticket stub from the time I was 86ed from an amusement park. (I did not eat enough after training that morning.) I was escorted on a golf cart back to our car where I finished Neal's now charmingly quaint essay with the plastic handle listening to Nirvana.

This was August 2001 and Mac OS X had barely come out. Maybe AI rhymes where Chinese free open-models clean up but someone proprietary figures it out. Which is sad as someone dominant in the ecosystem right now is the equivalent of Gary Kildall.

Post reply on HN