I remember coming across this article when it was doing the rounds a while ago now. Although I didn’t read it at the time, I wish that I had. It’s nice and short and offers easily actionable advice for anyone who’s looking to get more from note-taking and maybe make their learning process a little easier.
The gist of it is that studies say that writing notes by hand greatly improves recall, retention and comprehension when studying. After some light searching there doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence to the contrary. Having said that, some of the comments on the article stated that digitally typing notes worked better for them.
The article sets up a premise of urgently needing to complete a task at work. You have previously been in a meeting which gave you all the requisite information but since you didn’t take any notes, you can’t remember the necessary details. Then they cover the high level benefits of how handwriting will improve your situation. There are two major sections - one for comprehension and one for recall. Finally it states how typing just isn’t as good.
Visual Process
It makes an unsubstantiated claim about how humans are visual learners. They link this statement to a study done in which the 'learning to write process' in children is considered a visual one. Children will visually recognise that letters they write match ones that they copy whilst learning - even if their attempts aren’t accurate. The study says that the writing process is unique and personal which, in turn, creates better comprehension and language recognition. Intuitively this makes sense I suppose. You have to actively visually process what you are writing as you write it, therefore engaging your brain more. There also seems to be some evidence that the linking of the motor process to the visual one improves overall understanding too.
One mistake they may have made here is assuming that what works during development for young children also has the same benefits for adults. That said, they state that writing is a practiced skill. Usually people will only learn to write once in their life - as young children. For any other skill though, if you were poor at it, you would just practice or consciously learn to be better. They claim it’s like if you learnt the fundamentals of an instrument. Then if all you did was play songs instead of practicing technique, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to get better.
Physical Process
The second point focuses less on the visual aspect and more on the physical one. The takeaway is pretty much the same though. Going through that personalised experience of writing and linking various complex brain processes together yield strong benefits.
There is quite an emphasis on writing being a ‘creative’ - the creative representation of language through the physical process of writing by hand. Additionally, there is the act of translating thought to page through motor skills, engaging the physical senses (i.e. the feel of the paper on your hand, the sensation of the pen writing on the paper) and the active reading comprehension required to understand what you are writing as you write it. All these aspects link strongly together to set your brain up well to understand and remember things well.
Comparison to digital notes
There is a bit of sloppiness present, where they mention there are ‘a few studies’ done comparing handwriting notes vs digitally typing them. Obviously the single one they cite supports the fact that writing is better. That paper’s conclusions were that there was ‘more brain activity’ during recall for people who hand-wrote their notes (whatever that means). But one concrete claim is that the recall was actually faster compared to the digital note takers.
One of the ideas that the referenced paper had was that because digital information is always presented uniformly (e.g. on the same screen, same fonts, same styles etc) it is harder to recall than from a unique document written by hand (calling back to that ‘personalised experience’ point from before).
The ideas about the typing experience are that it’s not creative enough nor challenging enough for your mind to create a memorable experience. So typing notes is meant to be pretty mediocre and you won’t remember what you’ve written.
Response and discussion
Quite a lot of the comments brought up limitations to the writing process since the article didn’t really say anything about the downsides.
- Typed / digital notes are easier to store, organise, rearrange and share.
- This is a good point to make. Especially on storage, particularly long-term storage. It’s drastically easier to keep digital notes stored since it requires a lot more effort not to lose a physical piece of paper.
- Digital notes are searchable
- Also irrefutable. This can clearly divide the two options into separate use cases. If you are writing notes one project at a time, I definitely think handwriting them is better. When you introduce context switching and/or multitasking, the ability to search becomes a lot more useful.
- If it’s more important that you can reference specific details in notes over a longer period of time, then I imagine digital would be much better.
- Editing notes
- You can’t edit written notes in place - or at least definitely not as easily as digital ones. Any physical edits will likely just have to be appended but that causes information to be spread out, making it harder to comprehend.
- Speed
- In circumstances where you are constrained by time, you may not be able to write fast enough to take all the notes you need to. In these cases it’ll be a massive benefit if you have access to recordings.
- An idea I had regarding this is that a combined approach might be possible. This would roughly look like taking physical notes for the high-level ideas and making reference to digital notes in cases where writing them would be inconvenient. Generally though, prefer physical notes whenever possible.
- May not work for everyone
- It’s important to note this, but nothing really works for everyone.
- Can’t read my own handwriting
- Since the article states that writing is a learned skill, it may be possible to improve your own handwriting through practice, to the point where it is legible. If not, you are pretty much out of luck.
- Digital notes work better for me
- There were a few anecdotes about this being the case. If digital notes work better for you then that’s fine. There was no hard evidence provided for any of this though.
- Paper can feel physically constraining
- Personally, sometimes I have ideas structured in my head that feel like a piece of paper isn’t physically big enough to translate my thoughts. This is kind of vague though. When experiencing this before, I’ve found ‘infinite cavas’ software useful. Though obviously, the final result ends up in a state where it would have been possible to write it on paper. I think this comes down to needing to practice writing / diagramming more.
OCR Digitisation
I did wonder whether it’d be possible to use OCR to get the benefits of recall and comprehension from writing initially, then provide the long term benefits of storage and searching through an automatic digitisation. Luckily I had this idea after writing all of my notes so I could make a faithful attempt at it.
The OCR on my iPhone is pretty good so I tried its scanning feature. It only managed to pick up 50% of the lines of my notes. After seeing that, I didn’t bother to check the accuracy of what it had actually recognised. I think if you developed a style of handwriting that would be conducive to OCR that you could reap major rewards here. You would have to accept that it may be a long road to changing your writing style though. And probably that your writing speed would slow down significantly for some time.
Conclusion
Personally I’ll say that I did enjoy taking handwritten notes for this post. However it was quite a short source article. Something substantially longer may not be as nice. I think that I’m definitely going to try handwriting all my notes whenever I decide to learn something though. Especially some of those computer science topics which have been nagging at me for years to learn. Also, given that I have a writing backlog of around 200 items, I think I’m going to have a sore hand for a while.
Studies from the article
Handwriting in children’s development
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211949312000038
Typing vs writing: recall
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319080820.htm
Other references
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8222525/
Whilst there is some focus on comparing digital pens to ink pens, this study concludes that writing is superior to typing. Generally, emotions were more positive when writing vs typing. Memory formation was also better when writing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7731365/
I only read the abstract here but it seems for repeated handwriting of Chinese characters, free recall of those characters was improved. Although, recognising those characters independently of writing was not improved.
https://pld-literacy.org/the-importance-of-teaching-handwriting-for-cognitive-development/
Cites one of the original studies but also some others. Basically, writing is crucial to literacy development in children. Also, transitioning handwriting to an automatic / unconscious skill frees the brain up to focus on other aspects like content and spelling.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/ Infinite scroll is bad, brain likes to map things physically. Offloading memory to devices can damage memory (what would the greeks say?! (Method of Loci)). People who read print books will retain more information! Handwriting notes can act as a benefit for memory if you insist on reading your damn kindle.