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Writing by hand is good for your brain

nealstephenson.substack.com

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Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#121

Post by tadfisher »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #117

Does anyone here handwrite a blog? I've been thinking about doing that, but I'd be interested in how people accomplish it. Personally, I'd like this to be a hobby that gets me away from screens, so I'm looking to focus more on handwriting and minimize how much I'd need to interact with a digital device. "Paper Website" seems appealing, but I haven't tried it yet: https://paperwebsite.com/

Not a blog, but I handwrite presentation slides sometimes. And, of course, pages of notes. I use my ReMarkable 2 for that, so it's pretty easy to import to desktop and run scripts.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#122

Post by drivers99 »

I'm a convert to the idea of just having a cup full of Bic Cristal (cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, replaceable, 76 year old design) ball point pens. Whenever I temporarily misplace one, I just grab another from the cup as I find them. When I'm cleaning up, they all go back to the cup. However, his point about how hard you have to push to write is making me reconsider. On the other hand, I'm also not writing 42 inch high stacks of manuscripts like him.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#123

Post by thecombjelly »

I still hand write a lot of code, and especially when starting out on projects or making more fundamental changes. I find it leads to better architectural solutions. My thinking has been that writing it out by hand can be slower so my brain is incentivized to think through the options and come up with more concise solutions. But maybe, as the article suggests, there are other small factors to hand-writing that lead to an improvement as well. I also use then go through the hand-written code to "execute" programs in my head and I think this also leads to higher-quality code. I encourage anyone that wants to be genuinely good at programming and software engineering to give it a try.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#124

Post by bodge5000 »

dSebastien wrote: post #41
postalcoder wrote: post #20

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…

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

I don't mean this with any disrespect, but people love to find ways to overcomplicate things that work perfectly well. And maybe for some reason that overcomplicated version works better, but for many it's at best a waste of time, at worst an active distraction from the thing your trying to do.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#126

Post by madcaptenor »

postalcoder wrote: post #20

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…

I need to remember that this is okay. I didn't do it because of concerns about resale value... but recently I sold books for the first time in a while and got so little money that I realize this is not worth worrying about.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#127

Post by pyrophane »

> "don't use a gadget"

I agree with this but for a different reason than what the author gives.

When you write in a notebook you can see where what you are writing is within the notebook (e.g. ~1/3 of the way through, etc). That seems like a small thing but I think it really helps with anchoring the memory when writing, as well as with referencing it later. And of course you can also add all sorts of tabs and page markers to help even more.

The same is true when reading a book.

Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain

#128

Post by pyrophane »

qiller wrote: post #73

Always found that writing stuff down helps me to remember things better, whether studying something, prepping for an exam, or in general. Didn't even matter if I didn't look at those notes again, it just got "stored" better. Didn't know he is a lefty too! Fountain pens + lefty is a tough combo; we had to use fountain pens in the 1st grade and my wrist was always stained on the side. Agree with the rollerball angle, P…

I've thought about how hard it must be to be a lefty fountain pen user. What is one to do? Learn to write without resting your hand on the page?
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