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Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

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Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#161

Post by naet »

vogt wrote: post #148

I'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…

I don't have a resource but I'd recommend slowing down your writing speed, doing some practice, and possibly experimenting with other writing styles. Writing is like other physical skills, you need to get your practice and reps in to build your muscle memory.

My writing is pretty illegible when I write quickly, but when I slow down and use capital style block letters my notes are a lot easier to read back later.

As a side note, sometimes it doesn't matter if the notes are illegible later. Just the very act of trying to write it helps with the later retention as you are more deeply engaging with your brain and muscle combination. In school I often took written notes that never got looked at again, but just having taken the notes helped a lot.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#162

Post by DiggyJohnson »

vogt wrote: post #148

I'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…

What I did - and I'm handwriting the manuscript/first rough draft of a non-technical book - is the slow down to whatever speed allowed me to form letters consistently and neatly.

I found this to be massively effective, and I recovered my cursive script that I hadn't really used since I was 12, and am now up to "full speed" again. Like anything really, slow deliberate practice is pretty much the only, best tool you've got.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#163

Post by criddell »

gjulianm wrote: post #34
mgreg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some good studies on this topic such as this one from UCLA. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu... Abstract: Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distractio…

As someone who's taken notes with my laptop for my bachelor and master degree, these studies seem to miss a lot of the learning process. For starters, it's not just "take notes" and leave it at that. Those notes are reviewed, modified, reorganized, corrected, and studied. It's so much easier to just carry a laptop with several files instead of a variety of notebooks. So much easier to search in files, to rewrite/reor…

I’ve always wondered the same thing. Does the handwriting benefit apply only for the first pass at taking the note, or does it hold up after all the other steps that you mentioned?

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#164

Post by 998244353 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #147
headbee wrote: post #4

I 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…

Notes were a kind of write only memory for me - I rarely referred to them, preferring the textbook or other resources, but I still wrote them because it's supposed to help retention.

I'm the same way. I discovered that taking notes was a fairly effective way to make sure I actually thoroughly read the material and that I don't just lapse into skimming the book. Not sure how important doing them in handwriting was, but it felt more useful.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#166

Post by jackphilson »

I don't think the purpose of notes is to retain information. It is to more quickly re-obtain information that has already been obtained. Handwriting is considerably slower than typing for this purpose. To retain information, use spaced repetition and active recall instead.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#167

Post by fedeb95 »

vogt wrote: post #148

I'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…

Just write. No one is going to judge you for your notes. After a lot of pages you get better. Also reading helps

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#168

Post by headbee »

_-_-__-_-_- wrote: post #29
headbee wrote: post #4

I 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.

I don't host it, per-se: I use VimWiki, and occasionally Obsidian for the pretty graph. VimWiki even has a static site generator, but I use Pandoc for that. For search I use FZF and ripgrep.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#169

Post by wanderingstan »

vogt wrote: post #148

I'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…

A helpful search keyword would be handwriting repair.

There are a lot of videos and pdfs on the subject.

That said, I find all of them wanting and have thought of making my own course/book someday. Bottom line is learn a good alphabet, then practice it whenever you can until it becomes automatic like playing with a fidget spinner.

Self plug: I hit Reddit’s front page with some of my work practice alphabets. https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/969vta/i_practice_alp...

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#170

Post by chongli »

WalterBright wrote: post #82

Yup. The way to attend a lecture is to leave your laptop behind. Take a cheap spiral notebook and a couple colored pens. Take notes. Once the notebook is filled (or the semester is over) scan the pages, toss the notebook, and buy a fresh one for the next semester. It works, from much personal experience You're welcome! 1. yes, sometimes I fall behind the lecturer taking notes, which can be a bit frustrating 2. while…

This only works with old-school professors who teach by writing on the blackboard. New-school professors like to bombard you with one-hour, 50-slide Powerpoint presentations where each slide has a full page of text in 12-point font, with a smattering of images and diagrams throughout. Since the prof does not need to take time to write anything down, they have no qualms about showing one of these slides for a total of 10 seconds before jumping to the next.

Of course, the nice new-school profs will provide their slide deck as a download some time later that day. The nicer ones will provide the slide deck at least one hour before class, giving you a chance to download it so you can follow along. And the really nice ones will provide the slides in a format with plenty of space along the sides to take your own notes. This works great either for printing out and taking notes directly on the page or for making notes on an iPad or Windows tablet (with OneNote).

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