511–520 of 708 posts
I've always dabbled with this but gone back to just typing instead of writing by hand as it seens to possess many more advantages
The closest thing I have to this is more like speech to text or notes on a phone which seem more manual (speech) or slower than touch typing (phone)
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I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture. "Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick. It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you…
Your argument is that in order for you to have a better experience the previous owner should not “ruin” the book for you. I’ve read better arguments on bathroom stalls.
I've always been pretty skeptical of the data which says handwriting is better for learning than typing. Yes, handwriting causes more brain activity, but just because your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing! For example, if I asked you to code FizzBuzz while riding a unicycle, I'm pretty sure you would show more brain activity than if you were just sitting at a desk. This does not mean it's…
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When you are writing notes during lectures, you should not write word for word. If you do, you will never catch up with what is said. People often speak faster than they write. If you want to take notes during lectures, you need to learn how to summarize in your own words. You need to write the stuff down so you can remember what was in the lecture. Something you can summarize the whole sentence with one word. Notes…
This doesn’t work well with hard science lectures like physics or math. Even when just copying what the professor what writing on the blackboard I could barely keep up. It’s hard to summarize those lectures on the fly, and it might be a mistake as you’ll miss some important steps.
I found the exact opposite. My math and physics lecturers were expecting us to write what they wrote on the blackboards or overhead projectors down. So they had prepared the lectures this way, they wrote at a decent speed so you had time, and you could think about the steps as you transposed it to the notebook.
I found many small mistakes the lecturer had made this way, forgotten a sign or forgotten a factor, as I would follow along the whole time and go "wait, how did he get this from that".
I wrote it all down, but I seldom had to study them afterwards. I would often just gloss over and I would recall it all.
This was in stark contrast to other and later classes where the university administration had pushed hard for slideshow-based lectures. There the slides moved so fast I didn't have time to take proper notes, or I had to sacrifice listening to the lecturer. I ended up stop taking notes and just listen, but the memory of that wasn't as good as the handwritten notes, not by a long shot.
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…
MAny a times, the books I read don't have enough place to scribble so I keep a A5 half folded as a bookmark and write notes on that with page numbers. Once the book is over, I read through the points and try to reconstruct.
I use a mechanical pencil myself since I like the teeth and my handwriting is better when I use it. Also, ability to erase (not for cleanliness but more to avoid wastage of space) is useful.
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Well not everyone has the privilege to buy new books, especially course-mandated books that the professor "coincidentally" wrote and costs hundreds of dollars. I would even say that "crossing out lines you disagree with" is vandalism because a book can always be read by others and come to a different conclusion and debate in their mind from there. Why treat books as disposable mind scaffolds when they can be used aga…
> I would even say that "crossing out lines you disagree with" is vandalism if you cross out words in a book you borrowed, that is vandalism. if you cross out words in a book you own, by definition, that is not vandalism. it would be uncool to mark up a textbook you planned to resell at the end of the semester, but it still would not be vandalism assuming you bought the textbook.
Once I settled on this method, other writing setups felt unsatisfying. Maybe others will enjoy this setup as much as I do :)
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The book is "Making Good in Business" by Roger W. Babson. Babson gifted the book to Edison in 1921. Here is a link to a scan of another copy of the book in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P9-DAU-349/mode/2up Here is my github repo with scans of the marginalia from Edison: https://github.com/RRWagner/Making-Good-in-Business-Babson-E...
Got excited to check it out. fyi the same image (inscription) somehow got uploaded for all the images.
I’m also opposed to getting too precious about writing tools. So many people have drawers full of fancy notebooks with something on the first few pages and the rest empty. Get something and use it. Don’t matter if it’s a dollar-store spiral notebook or a fancy Leuchturm 1917 notebook, just as long as you use it. Same with the writing utensil. Pencil? Ballpoint pen? Whatever. I find these days I prefer to write using a cheap mechanical pencil (the kind they sell in bags of 20 at the supermarket), but I’ll use whatever.
I used to be really precious about these things. I only used college-ruled 9½×6 150-page spiral bound notebooks and wrote in 0.4mm fine-point felt tip pen. Did all my first drafts by hand. It ended up being an excuse to not finish stuff. I do most of my first drafts typing now, because it lets me get s⸻ done (although I still take notes by hand because that helps me remember what I took notes on better).
I don’t buy the cursive thing, mostly because I write slower in cursive than in print (although I have a handful of ligatures and abbreviations I use to speed up some things).
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…