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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

#51

Post by tejohnso »

squirrel6 wrote: post #15
hknmtt wrote: post #3

I have started to journal last month. I came to it through pens when I randomly decided to find a good pen when I got interested in it through some youtube videos(wow, YT actually working as intended, for once). To anyone interested, Pentel Energel 0.7mm is the best gel pen in the entire world, hands down. For oil-based ink, it would be Uniball Jetstream, i guess(i am gel guy). I always wanted to journal and thought…

I am left-handed and the Energel has totally changed my life— it’s the best pen I’ve ever had. I have recently come to believe Pentel is (pardon the cliche) the Apple of writing instruments. They’ve simply PM’d the hell out of their product over time, and it really shows.

Lefty here as well. I always preferred the precision and consistency of a 0.5mm mechanical pencil over any type of pen. The option to easily erase a mistake is pretty nice. And the option to write from very faint to fairly heavy comes in handy.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#52

Post by ryanklee »

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…

> 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.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#53

Post by maegul »

wizofaus wrote: post #46
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…

> probably sculpted by our evolution I can't really begin to imagine what selective pressure could realistically have acted on this, certainly given the tiny period of time over which any substantial percentage of the population would have been using their hands to store information in any way. If there's any correlation between use of computers and any loss of ability to memorise concepts (which I'm not convinced we…

Superficial take IMO.

Don’t need a selective pressure for a cognitive process to work in a particular way. You just need a selective pressure for the cognitive skill and for the way that skill works to at least not have a pressure against it, biology being full of engineering compromises.

Learning well with handwriting, IMO, has little to do with hands specifically, but memory and understanding in general, where the spatially situated product of the action (on a specific piece of paper used and then kept in a specific place) taken in a properly free form manner with much more analogue detail (paper is a blank canvas and handwriting will have nuance throughout a piece of writing) that most likely also slows you down and forces a huge number of little decisions all facilitate the task of memorisation and recall.

That spatially attendant information assists memory seems to me very plausibly consistent with primate evolution where most if not all tasks benefiting from memory would have had such information as either a fundamental component or readily associated.

For similar reasons, I think there’s something to be said for sorting important information in physical books on shelves, where the location of information in the physical space can aid recall.

I think it’s easy to forget just how weirdly disconnected and abstract the computer interface is from everything else we use in the world.

Ideally, computers ought to be driving at optimising for humans rather than merely what works well for the tech. I think that’s been left behind too much.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#54

Post by jonstewart »

I was terrible at handwriting (especially cursive) as a kid, absolutely hated it, and my teachers compensated by having me do more work on the computer. Fantastic outcome.

No fusty article in the Economist could convince me that cursive handwriting is a skill worth saving. When it came to taking notes in college, I realized I was lousy at taking notes by hand, that I’d pay more attention to the lecturer and wind up with few notes. When I took a laptop, I realized I could basically take dictation while still paying attention to what was said.

Doodling programs out on a notebook does work better for me than doing similar on an iPad, however.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#55

Post by _a_a_a_ »

> It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding

Hmm. Maybe for you but perhaps you could back that claim up regarding the rest of the population. For me it matters not whether it be handwritten or typed, so long as it's there. Content is king.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#56

Post by EdwardCoffin »

lgrebe wrote: post #50
jmkd wrote: post #32

If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding. I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take not…

Marion Richardson Handwriting was first published in 1935 and continued to be used in schools until the 1980s. It consists of five copy books, each with a different level of difficulty, and a teacher's book that explains the methods and materials to be used. You can download the copy books for free from this link: [Writing and Writing Patterns]( https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007 .)

I only see the teacher's book at that link. Were the copy books elsewhere?

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#57

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

jmkd wrote: post #32

If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding. I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take not…

I recall my mother writing a personal letter to sooth a family dispute. It was long. She wrote it on the computer, so she could edit it and arrange her words to fit her meaning, printed it, and copied it out longhand for the personal touch.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#58

Post by EdwardCoffin »

weeb wrote: post #18
hknmtt wrote: post #3

I have started to journal last month. I came to it through pens when I randomly decided to find a good pen when I got interested in it through some youtube videos(wow, YT actually working as intended, for once). To anyone interested, Pentel Energel 0.7mm is the best gel pen in the entire world, hands down. For oil-based ink, it would be Uniball Jetstream, i guess(i am gel guy). I always wanted to journal and thought…

Do you have any recommendations for getting over the friction of starting? Like, suggestions of what to write about if you're unsure what's worth putting to paper. I'm sure I'd have plenty to write once I got started, but an empty notebook is intimidating!

I keep a big notebook (12" x 9" I think) that I write quotations I like in, with a fountain pen. I try to transcribe one quotation per day, from a computer file of such quotations. This keeps my hand in with respect to handwriting, keeps my fountain pen from drying up, and doesn't take too much time.

I also keep a journal, but I do that on computer because I value being able to electronically search it.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#59

Post by woolion »

trimble_tromble wrote: post #25

The article makes it sound as if the benefit of handwriting vs. typing is a settled matter. But a recent metaanalysis finds no overall benefit of handwriting over typing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X2...

Thank you for this link!

I cannot access the paper right now, but the abstract mentions that most research might have been confounded by the distractions provided by computers rather that by typing/handwriting.

Which is actually a big problem, but suggests that there is a need for better tools --for example support of 'activities' at the Desktop Environment level, such as KDE, which might only give access to a subset of the available applications. This would allow one to have archived and searchable notes typed at full speed --rather than the slow handwriting which might be hard on the wrists-- and not suffer from the distraction problem.

I would even go one step further: while I was translating a book, I used a dictionary on my computer to check some words from time to time. Nowadays I would just use wiktionary to do so, but that means that google might suck you into a rabbit hole at the first failing of will; it would be even better to have the ability to block any other sites when in this activity.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#60

Post by RetroTechie »

m463 wrote: post #23
lifthrasiir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the key is not really handwriting but rather a deliberate summarization, because I always used a computer to do that. I did have a printout of my own summary, of course, so papers may have also helped as well. (I also tended to walk around and mumble a lot when I really need to tackle a hard problem in my head, but not when studying.)

I wonder too. I remember doing python the hard way years ago, which encouraged you to type in the example python programs and run them yourself. It made a definite difference to sort of deliberately slow down and absorb during the exercise.

That's nothing. Try handcoding machine code some time! Using only pen, paper & cpu datasheet. ;-) If you feel generous, throw in a calculator for offsets or hex/dec conversions etc.

If I grow old & senile some day, I'll forget how to wipe my ass before the last Z80 mnemonic slips from my mind.

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