One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.
Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesise ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing. But those taking notes by hand also perform better on tests when students are later able to study from their notes. The effect even persisted when the students who typed were explicitly instructed to rephrase the material in their own words. The instruction was “completely ineffective” at reducing verbatim note-taking, the researchers note: they did not understand the material so much as parrot it.
Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by age seven.
I adore research like this. Hardwriting, despite being a truly learnt activity... has massive benefits for how we actually cogitate and understand the world around us. I have to wonder if there's...
I adore research like this. Hardwriting, despite being a truly learnt activity... has massive benefits for how we actually cogitate and understand the world around us.
I have to wonder if there's a connection between journalling and emotional understanding due to being hand-written now? There's one thing to cognitively go "Hmm, I am sad" and another to write down what has made you sad and then defining that emotion.
Anecdotal, but I recently became addicted to journaling and I agree with your take. I also have been taking notes on certain articles and books I read. Learning how to be a more active reader has...
Anecdotal, but I recently became addicted to journaling and I agree with your take. I also have been taking notes on certain articles and books I read. Learning how to be a more active reader has opened up an entirely new hobby for me, where I go down these fun research rabbit holes. Here are the articles that got me into it if you're interested:
Ha. Another FS'er I see. I like a quick flick through their stuff. I've journalled all my life it feels, and it helps so so much with my emotional wellbeing. The notes thing in articles is...
Ha. Another FS'er I see. I like a quick flick through their stuff.
I've journalled all my life it feels, and it helps so so much with my emotional wellbeing. The notes thing in articles is fantastic isn't it? I find highlighting and then postits for the notes in books are amazing.
It might just be part of the overall trend of people moving away from laptops in general, with people favouring tablets and phones instead. I'm not sure if this is just my observation or if this...
It might just be part of the overall trend of people moving away from laptops in general, with people favouring tablets and phones instead. I'm not sure if this is just my observation or if this is actual fact though.
Tablets and ....styli? my friend. They are a huge game changer. Better than physical notebooks IMO as organizing sections, pages and sub-pages forces your brain to remember some kind of hierarchy...
Tablets and ....styli? my friend. They are a huge game changer. Better than physical notebooks IMO as organizing sections, pages and sub-pages forces your brain to remember some kind of hierarchy without any obvious effort at rote learning, e.g. chapter topics per chapter from a textbook....you get that just by keeping your digital notes organized by lecture/topic.
This is very interesting. As someone who has always been into technology, when I started college, (over 15 years ago, which I just realized) I remember trying to type my notes in class and finding...
This is very interesting. As someone who has always been into technology, when I started college, (over 15 years ago, which I just realized) I remember trying to type my notes in class and finding that I didn't understand anything when reviewing them. I had to go back to hand-writing them just to get the material. To this day, I still hand-write notes in meetings so I can absorb the discussion.
Having a first grader now, I have always advocated for them to focus on writing, so it's studies like this and my own personal experiences that just reinforce the need to push for a focus on writing. I will have to make sure I pay attention to the curriculum to ensure that things are being taught/utilized.
I've been avid advocate for taking notes with a pencil (or pen if you are fearless) and paper for years. I have many, many notebooks full of all sorts of great information from work and other...
I've been avid advocate for taking notes with a pencil (or pen if you are fearless) and paper for years. I have many, many notebooks full of all sorts of great information from work and other projects. I have always found I learn and comprehend better when I'm taking notes by hand and have always said it helps.
Crazy there is actual research to prove this is mostly correct.
While I often takes notes during meetings at work on a laptop, one thing that I've always found annoying is the inability to quickly draw or even make arrows between connecting ideas. Circling...
While I often takes notes during meetings at work on a laptop, one thing that I've always found annoying is the inability to quickly draw or even make arrows between connecting ideas. Circling things or drawing lines or whatever seems to help me out. I don't have a touchscreen laptop and generally I've found ones I've used to be lacking anyway.
Even though I try to be as paperless as possible, I've noticed that my default is still pen and paper. I was in a Teams meeting last week and had OneNote open on another screen with a few notes. At one point, someone gave me a task that I wasn't expecting. I immediately grabbed a pen and a small block of sticky notes and jotted it down there (over a few sticky notes), instead of typing it in.
Huh, I just connected this to the other comment in this thread about the waning prevalence of lap[tops in favor of paper or tablets. I think that the ease of creating shapes other than the ones...
Huh, I just connected this to the other comment in this thread about the waning prevalence of lap[tops in favor of paper or tablets. I think that the ease of creating shapes other than the ones directly on the keyboard is very appealing and, now that tablets are relatively inexpensive for the power that they can have (relative to laptops, which as an aside, I think probably gained in popularity because they were somewhat necessary for performing classwork and were expensive, so taking notes on a laptop was both pragmatic [I already own it and it was expensive] and a piece of conspicuous consumerism [it was expensive and I want to flaunt it.])
Anyway, what a long way to agree that "arrows hard on computer."
I like the idea of being paperless - you know, for the environment and stuff - but I find that since I keep these papers with me and I'm not discarding them they don't feel like a waste. Its...
I like the idea of being paperless - you know, for the environment and stuff - but I find that since I keep these papers with me and I'm not discarding them they don't feel like a waste. Its definitely something I think about a lot as I try and lower my carbon footprint.
I guess a fun thought experiment is if the mulch to make my paper has a higher impact on the environment than the power consumption of the computer, router, and servers that make up the ability to use something like OneNote.
Also to address the first thing you said - I have my own little notation now for action items, relating things, to dos, that I have developed over years of taking pencil to paper. So its definitely a benefit I feel.
Don't forget the energy and material costs involved in making the computer in the first place. Paper is biodegradable, generally made from sustainable sources (as in they farm trees for paper,...
Don't forget the energy and material costs involved in making the computer in the first place. Paper is biodegradable, generally made from sustainable sources (as in they farm trees for paper, they aren't cutting down virgin forests for it), and going from tree to paper is a lot less involved than going from rocks and petroleum to a computer. You have to use a lot of paper for the laptop to be more sustainable. Cutting paper out only really helps if you've got to have the computer anyway, and then it's computer with less paper instead of computer with the same amount of paper you'd use without the computer, rather than deciding between computer or paper.
Forgive me if this comes across as "have you just tried writing?", because, trust me, I understand that kind of struggle, even if not specifically with dysgraphia. Are you aware of or have you...
Forgive me if this comes across as "have you just tried writing?", because, trust me, I understand that kind of struggle, even if not specifically with dysgraphia.
Are you aware of or have you tried any therapies that try to divorce writing from the visual tracking? I imagine it's distinct person to person, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some form of cursive practice done without watching your hand might be able to cement literal muscle memory and give you more energy to focus on the other aspects. I'm hardly an occupational therapist though, just curious about what the experience of these sorts of neurodivergences is like, feel free to ignore this comment if it's annoying.
Anecdotally, as someone with ADHD who had bad dysgraphia growing up, my handwriting improved massively after I started using a fountain pen. It kind of forced me to change the way I wrote and get...
Anecdotally, as someone with ADHD who had bad dysgraphia growing up, my handwriting improved massively after I started using a fountain pen. It kind of forced me to change the way I wrote and get rid of a lot of bad habits because otherwise it wouldn't make a mark at all.
It's also just less fatiguing and more pleasant to write with than most other modern writing implements. It glides over the paper and doesn't need any pressure beyond the weight of the pen to work.
Another side effect of it is I just naturally developed my own cursive style from print. Turns out most of those weird loops that never made a lick of sense were a result of things that fountain pens just kind of do naturally because of that lack of pressure needed to make a mark that I mentioned. Not all of them, though. Fuck Palmer style, is all I have to say. They teach italic style cursive in Europe for a reason, and that reason is it's designed for reading and writing, not looking pretty but also looking nothing like the alphabet that it claims to be.
Or really, not even designed. It really is just print joined up.
Yeah, I'm fortunate I didn't end up with a bad (as in, inaccurate) diagnosis of dysgraphia. Between ADHD and connective tissue problems, my handwriting was abysmal, writing in long form with #2/HB...
Yeah, I'm fortunate I didn't end up with a bad (as in, inaccurate) diagnosis of dysgraphia. Between ADHD and connective tissue problems, my handwriting was abysmal, writing in long form with #2/HB pencil or cheap ballpoints was just not going to happen for me, and I found a lot of relief when I got a fountain pen at the beginning of high school. Along the same lines, I ended up with a very aberrant cursive style, though yours sounds a bit more, well, italic, and mine is more in the spencerian tradition, as much as I agree that Palmer workbooks can go die in a firepit. "Yeah, let's just pretend that ballpoints are exactly the same as fountain pens and dip pens, and force the kids to carve lines and swirls in seemingly-random places!"
I didn't know this was a thing, is this something that can be "trained away" to an extend? For example I'm dyslectic but thanks to getting into fountain pens I started actually enjoying writing...
dysgraphia
I didn't know this was a thing, is this something that can be "trained away" to an extend?
For example I'm dyslectic but thanks to getting into fountain pens I started actually enjoying writing and reading in my native language. Now I read a lot better (tough still with issues), so it kinda got trained away
It has to do with organizational things in the brain. So not really trained away personally. It also effects my visual organization. So like I can't do bubble graphs or draw very well (at least...
It has to do with organizational things in the brain.
So not really trained away personally. It also effects my visual organization.
So like I can't do bubble graphs or draw very well (at least not without a lot of effort and time).
Thank you so much for leaving these comments. Handwriting and drawing have been a shameful struggle for me for as long as I could remember. When I was in kindergarten a teacher (who I later...
Thank you so much for leaving these comments. Handwriting and drawing have been a shameful struggle for me for as long as I could remember.
When I was in kindergarten a teacher (who I later anecdotally learned was not a fan of children of single mothers, like myself) interrupted another staff member trying to teach me how to hold a crayon. Since I had been 'bad' my punishment was to miss out on learning how to hold it properly, and I distinctly remember her 'correcting' me and forcing me to grip it incorrectly. I distinctly remember her saying something to the effect of "Don't bother with him" and "You don't get to, you've been difficult".
I've always struggled with my handwritting and avoid writing in cards like the plague. My hand cramps terribly and I struggle with my spacing and consistent quality over long paragraphs. I don't know how much that has to do with the experience I just spoke of, but it's such a relief to have a word I can associate with those difficulties and some research to look in to.
Were you diagnosed as an adult by any chance? And if so, how did you go about seeking a diagnosis?
Always a bit comforting to hear I'm not the only one struggling. I was diagnosed as a kid. I don't even remember actually my mom had them check when I was diagnosed for dyslexia as well.
Always a bit comforting to hear I'm not the only one struggling. I was diagnosed as a kid. I don't even remember actually my mom had them check when I was diagnosed for dyslexia as well.
I didn’t have a laptop during college in 2009 onward (I misguidedly used that money on a desktop instead), and so was forced to write. Unfortunately I never was able to get my handwriting up to a...
I didn’t have a laptop during college in 2009 onward (I misguidedly used that money on a desktop instead), and so was forced to write.
Unfortunately I never was able to get my handwriting up to a speed that allowed me to keep up with the professor. I was perpetually lagging and sometimes got so far behind that I had to skip ahead which meant a good chunk of things didn’t get written, making the notes less useful.
The theory behind forcing the student to synthesize is solid, but I don’t know that it applied to me. Between not knowing which details were/weren’t important and being in a constant panic trying to keep up my mind wasn’t in a place where it could effectively synthesize shorter things to write on the fly.
I type much more quickly than I can write and this has been true for a long, long time even though I had a mostly-analog childhood, and I think I probably would’ve done better in college if I’d bought a laptop and been able to type my notes.
Did you know cursive? I found that cursive was the only way I could keep up with lectures, but I know a lot of people never really learned it. In my school district, we spent a few months learning...
Did you know cursive? I found that cursive was the only way I could keep up with lectures, but I know a lot of people never really learned it. In my school district, we spent a few months learning cursive in the 4th grade, and then that was the last we ever used it. I liked the way it looked, so I made a point to maintain the skill — which turned out to come in extremely handy later on — but most of my classmates did not.
I did know cursive, and in fact used it through most of the lower grades, but by the time I got to high school I'd fallen back to using print instead due to the indifference towards school I'd...
I did know cursive, and in fact used it through most of the lower grades, but by the time I got to high school I'd fallen back to using print instead due to the indifference towards school I'd developed and resulting lack of note-taking. Little did I know that would come back to bite me in college.
I can still write it today but I'm quite slow. It'd take considerable practice to get back up to speed.
This reminded me of the quote which is truer now more than ever: Personally I have been writing by hand for my entire professional career (12 years now) and I keep paper notebooks. I've tried most...
This reminded me of the quote which is truer now more than ever:
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
Credit: Leslie Lamport
Personally I have been writing by hand for my entire professional career (12 years now) and I keep paper notebooks.
I've tried most of the note taking apps on the market and also use org-mode in emacs, but paper is my go to.
The older I get the more I value good writing in myself and others.
I find the more time I spend on cheap printer paper or in my notebooks, the better the result when I come to draft that email or power point slide or whatever.
I adore research like this. Hardwriting, despite being a truly learnt activity... has massive benefits for how we actually cogitate and understand the world around us.
I have to wonder if there's a connection between journalling and emotional understanding due to being hand-written now? There's one thing to cognitively go "Hmm, I am sad" and another to write down what has made you sad and then defining that emotion.
Anecdotal, but I recently became addicted to journaling and I agree with your take. I also have been taking notes on certain articles and books I read. Learning how to be a more active reader has opened up an entirely new hobby for me, where I go down these fun research rabbit holes. Here are the articles that got me into it if you're interested:
https://fs.blog/feynman-learning-technique/
https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/
https://fs.blog/marginalia/
Ha. Another FS'er I see. I like a quick flick through their stuff.
I've journalled all my life it feels, and it helps so so much with my emotional wellbeing. The notes thing in articles is fantastic isn't it? I find highlighting and then postits for the notes in books are amazing.
It might just be part of the overall trend of people moving away from laptops in general, with people favouring tablets and phones instead. I'm not sure if this is just my observation or if this is actual fact though.
Tablets and ....styli? my friend. They are a huge game changer. Better than physical notebooks IMO as organizing sections, pages and sub-pages forces your brain to remember some kind of hierarchy without any obvious effort at rote learning, e.g. chapter topics per chapter from a textbook....you get that just by keeping your digital notes organized by lecture/topic.
This is very interesting. As someone who has always been into technology, when I started college, (over 15 years ago, which I just realized) I remember trying to type my notes in class and finding that I didn't understand anything when reviewing them. I had to go back to hand-writing them just to get the material. To this day, I still hand-write notes in meetings so I can absorb the discussion.
Having a first grader now, I have always advocated for them to focus on writing, so it's studies like this and my own personal experiences that just reinforce the need to push for a focus on writing. I will have to make sure I pay attention to the curriculum to ensure that things are being taught/utilized.
I've been avid advocate for taking notes with a pencil (or pen if you are fearless) and paper for years. I have many, many notebooks full of all sorts of great information from work and other projects. I have always found I learn and comprehend better when I'm taking notes by hand and have always said it helps.
Crazy there is actual research to prove this is mostly correct.
While I often takes notes during meetings at work on a laptop, one thing that I've always found annoying is the inability to quickly draw or even make arrows between connecting ideas. Circling things or drawing lines or whatever seems to help me out. I don't have a touchscreen laptop and generally I've found ones I've used to be lacking anyway.
Even though I try to be as paperless as possible, I've noticed that my default is still pen and paper. I was in a Teams meeting last week and had OneNote open on another screen with a few notes. At one point, someone gave me a task that I wasn't expecting. I immediately grabbed a pen and a small block of sticky notes and jotted it down there (over a few sticky notes), instead of typing it in.
Huh, I just connected this to the other comment in this thread about the waning prevalence of lap[tops in favor of paper or tablets. I think that the ease of creating shapes other than the ones directly on the keyboard is very appealing and, now that tablets are relatively inexpensive for the power that they can have (relative to laptops, which as an aside, I think probably gained in popularity because they were somewhat necessary for performing classwork and were expensive, so taking notes on a laptop was both pragmatic [I already own it and it was expensive] and a piece of conspicuous consumerism [it was expensive and I want to flaunt it.])
Anyway, what a long way to agree that "arrows hard on computer."
I like the idea of being paperless - you know, for the environment and stuff - but I find that since I keep these papers with me and I'm not discarding them they don't feel like a waste. Its definitely something I think about a lot as I try and lower my carbon footprint.
I guess a fun thought experiment is if the mulch to make my paper has a higher impact on the environment than the power consumption of the computer, router, and servers that make up the ability to use something like OneNote.
Also to address the first thing you said - I have my own little notation now for action items, relating things, to dos, that I have developed over years of taking pencil to paper. So its definitely a benefit I feel.
Don't forget the energy and material costs involved in making the computer in the first place. Paper is biodegradable, generally made from sustainable sources (as in they farm trees for paper, they aren't cutting down virgin forests for it), and going from tree to paper is a lot less involved than going from rocks and petroleum to a computer. You have to use a lot of paper for the laptop to be more sustainable. Cutting paper out only really helps if you've got to have the computer anyway, and then it's computer with less paper instead of computer with the same amount of paper you'd use without the computer, rather than deciding between computer or paper.
I have infamously bad dysgraphia so this isn't looking good for me.
Forgive me if this comes across as "have you just tried writing?", because, trust me, I understand that kind of struggle, even if not specifically with dysgraphia.
Are you aware of or have you tried any therapies that try to divorce writing from the visual tracking? I imagine it's distinct person to person, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some form of cursive practice done without watching your hand might be able to cement literal muscle memory and give you more energy to focus on the other aspects. I'm hardly an occupational therapist though, just curious about what the experience of these sorts of neurodivergences is like, feel free to ignore this comment if it's annoying.
Anecdotally, as someone with ADHD who had bad dysgraphia growing up, my handwriting improved massively after I started using a fountain pen. It kind of forced me to change the way I wrote and get rid of a lot of bad habits because otherwise it wouldn't make a mark at all.
It's also just less fatiguing and more pleasant to write with than most other modern writing implements. It glides over the paper and doesn't need any pressure beyond the weight of the pen to work.
Another side effect of it is I just naturally developed my own cursive style from print. Turns out most of those weird loops that never made a lick of sense were a result of things that fountain pens just kind of do naturally because of that lack of pressure needed to make a mark that I mentioned. Not all of them, though. Fuck Palmer style, is all I have to say. They teach italic style cursive in Europe for a reason, and that reason is it's designed for reading and writing, not looking pretty but also looking nothing like the alphabet that it claims to be.
Or really, not even designed. It really is just print joined up.
Yeah, I'm fortunate I didn't end up with a bad (as in, inaccurate) diagnosis of dysgraphia. Between ADHD and connective tissue problems, my handwriting was abysmal, writing in long form with #2/HB pencil or cheap ballpoints was just not going to happen for me, and I found a lot of relief when I got a fountain pen at the beginning of high school. Along the same lines, I ended up with a very aberrant cursive style, though yours sounds a bit more, well, italic, and mine is more in the spencerian tradition, as much as I agree that Palmer workbooks can go die in a firepit. "Yeah, let's just pretend that ballpoints are exactly the same as fountain pens and dip pens, and force the kids to carve lines and swirls in seemingly-random places!"
Definitely have improved with practice but just like dyslexia it's just extremely difficult. I mostly type because I am a writer.
Well, that makes sense. Appreciate your reply, I'm always trying to understand foreign (to me) ways of experiencing the world.
I didn't know this was a thing, is this something that can be "trained away" to an extend?
For example I'm dyslectic but thanks to getting into fountain pens I started actually enjoying writing and reading in my native language. Now I read a lot better (tough still with issues), so it kinda got trained away
It has to do with organizational things in the brain.
So not really trained away personally. It also effects my visual organization.
So like I can't do bubble graphs or draw very well (at least not without a lot of effort and time).
Thank you so much for leaving these comments. Handwriting and drawing have been a shameful struggle for me for as long as I could remember.
When I was in kindergarten a teacher (who I later anecdotally learned was not a fan of children of single mothers, like myself) interrupted another staff member trying to teach me how to hold a crayon. Since I had been 'bad' my punishment was to miss out on learning how to hold it properly, and I distinctly remember her 'correcting' me and forcing me to grip it incorrectly. I distinctly remember her saying something to the effect of "Don't bother with him" and "You don't get to, you've been difficult".
I've always struggled with my handwritting and avoid writing in cards like the plague. My hand cramps terribly and I struggle with my spacing and consistent quality over long paragraphs. I don't know how much that has to do with the experience I just spoke of, but it's such a relief to have a word I can associate with those difficulties and some research to look in to.
Were you diagnosed as an adult by any chance? And if so, how did you go about seeking a diagnosis?
Always a bit comforting to hear I'm not the only one struggling. I was diagnosed as a kid. I don't even remember actually my mom had them check when I was diagnosed for dyslexia as well.
I didn’t have a laptop during college in 2009 onward (I misguidedly used that money on a desktop instead), and so was forced to write.
Unfortunately I never was able to get my handwriting up to a speed that allowed me to keep up with the professor. I was perpetually lagging and sometimes got so far behind that I had to skip ahead which meant a good chunk of things didn’t get written, making the notes less useful.
The theory behind forcing the student to synthesize is solid, but I don’t know that it applied to me. Between not knowing which details were/weren’t important and being in a constant panic trying to keep up my mind wasn’t in a place where it could effectively synthesize shorter things to write on the fly.
I type much more quickly than I can write and this has been true for a long, long time even though I had a mostly-analog childhood, and I think I probably would’ve done better in college if I’d bought a laptop and been able to type my notes.
Did you know cursive? I found that cursive was the only way I could keep up with lectures, but I know a lot of people never really learned it. In my school district, we spent a few months learning cursive in the 4th grade, and then that was the last we ever used it. I liked the way it looked, so I made a point to maintain the skill — which turned out to come in extremely handy later on — but most of my classmates did not.
I did know cursive, and in fact used it through most of the lower grades, but by the time I got to high school I'd fallen back to using print instead due to the indifference towards school I'd developed and resulting lack of note-taking. Little did I know that would come back to bite me in college.
I can still write it today but I'm quite slow. It'd take considerable practice to get back up to speed.
This reminded me of the quote which is truer now more than ever:
Personally I have been writing by hand for my entire professional career (12 years now) and I keep paper notebooks.
I've tried most of the note taking apps on the market and also use org-mode in emacs, but paper is my go to.
I follow the bullet journal method https://bulletjournal.com/ for my personal and professional life.
The older I get the more I value good writing in myself and others.
I find the more time I spend on cheap printer paper or in my notebooks, the better the result when I come to draft that email or power point slide or whatever.
Archived.