Comment by Wowfunhappy
5 days ago
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 an efficient way to program, nor that coding on a unicycle is better for learning.
I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
When I take notes when typing, I can transcribe the content word-for-word without knowing what I am hearing and without thinking about it.
When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.
I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.
Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.
When I hand write taking notes, I am indeed forced to slow down, and it's maddening. I'm busy trying to figure out how to condense the ideas into something I can quickly write, and in the meantime the lecturer is continuing and I've missed something important they've just said.
I genuinely do not understand how people find it helps them to handwrite notes in a lecture. If I type on my laptop, I can do that "mindlessly", which is beneficial because then I have enough of my brain free that I can also understand what the lecturer is saying. Ask a question if I have one, etc.
If I'm hand-writing notes in a notebook, I can't do any of that. I'm so focused on trying to get the stuff down that it's using a lot of my brain that I'd really rather be using to actually think more deeply about what is being said.
I'm genuinely so baffled by people who find that hand-writing notes helps them understand the material better. I used to assume they were terrible typists, but I don't think it's that.
But for example, with your comment, you say that when typing notes, you can transcribe word-for-word without knowing or thinking. But... why not just actually pay attention? Isn't that the whole point? Why do you need slower handwriting to force you to actually pay attention? That's what confuses me so much. I pay attention by default. Writing notes by hand takes away from my attention, because I have to give attention to that.
Writing notes by hand feels like it etches the concepts into my brain in a way that listening alone does not. Typing does not have the same feel.
I have never learned how to do something substantially difficult (math, foreign language, any science, or memorizing a substantial amount of content for a humanities course) without handwriting it. I remember in 8th grade latin, I copied down conjugation charts onto a chalkboard over and over until I had them memorized.
I cannot do university level mathematics without writing it down by hand.
My typing is much better than my penmanship, but it doesn't tend to make topics stick in my brain in the same way that handwriting them does.
3 replies →
It kept me listening. When I was on minute 70 of a boring lecture I started daydreaming. If I was writing even minimal notes, I'd need to briefly consider each idea and decide whether it was worth recording.
1 reply →
Where does this explanation fall apart? There must be a cutoff point where more difficulty of getting the info down is worse than more ease. Otherwise, wouldn't a better recommendation be to do all your notes more slowly tracing with your big toe in the sand and then taking pictures? Do touch typists get less out of digital note taking than hunt and peck typists?
Give subjects a chopstick for each hand and say you have to hold one end and type with the other, and then test recall/understanding? That could be interesting
If you don't read notes, why waste time making them instead of slowing down even more and spending that extra time/effort on active listening/thinking?
I get distracted and my mind starts to think of better ways to explain the last point... Soon I have no clue what the last ten minutes were about. Taking notes makes me get back on task faster so I can find the next note to write.
I'd like to slow down and just listen but the reality is I won't.
1 reply →
They way the slow down and spend extra effort is by writing notes.
Writing is thinking.
3 replies →
This is how it was explained to me by a tutor: handwriting is better for learning because it's slower. The need for brevity forces you to mentally engage the material in ways that are more conducive to understanding and recall.
If you can replicate that mental engagement while typing, you'd probably get similar results.
This makes a lot of sense to me in light of what we know about how learning happens. I have never seen any research on brain activity though, and my tutor didn't cite any.
I've heard this theory too—but I feel it doesn't match how we do anything else in life. For example, you could make typing slow too by forcing people to type with two fingers, or use a really tiny keyboard. Are touch typists worse at learning?
This doesn't really refute the theory—maybe touch typing is worse—but it doesn't match my logical intuition at all.
> Are touch typists worse at learning?
Wish I had a definitive answer. I do know from personal experience that when I'm touch typing notes while reading a book or listening to a lecture, my thoughts drift fairly often. (I'm a fairly fast touch typist though, 140+ wpm.) I'm also more likely to be thinking, "damn, that's a lot of notes!" rather than about the material, lol. Whereas while handwriting, I'm heavily engaged with the material, to the point where I lose sight of the fact that I'm in the middle of taking notes.
Oh and because it's so easy to make quick edits while typing, I find it hard to resist the impulse to correct a typo or add an extra word here and there, which further distracts me from the material.
Also, I can touch type for long stretches without the slightest mental fatigue, but I need a tiny mental break after 30-60 seconds of handwritten note taking.
If the method used for purposeful slow-down results in more cognitive load to type, it should make it worse. With enough practice with the method, the slow-down could remain whereas the cognitive load could go away. I think then it should match the effect seen with handwriting.
Here's my own more detailed article, though it's not saying much more on this.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/handwriting-better-than-typin...
Because it is about learning. You can't learn a hard phrase on an instrument without slowing down. You can't touch type fastly without learning the motions slowly first.
[dead]
IME it's not just about slower. It's about forcing you to think about how words go together, where line breaks fall, how you're laying out bullet points, etc.
Since you can change all of this on computers (or it happens automatically), you don't have to give it thought before writing it down.
>your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!
the thing it's doing when writing with your hand is fine motor control, one of the most important and distinguishing abilities that humans have.
I tutor in a makerspace and one thing I've observed it's that it's now easier to teach old people how to solder than younger kids, and that in my experience has never been the case before. Due to growing up on impoverished digital interfaces I see lack of dexterity that I've never seen in young people before. Same reason I suspect you see a decline in people picking up tactile musical instruments like the guitar or violin.
I agree that fine motor control is important, I just don't think forcing people (especially kids) to write by hand is necessarily the best way to do it. For example, if the kids went to your makerspace, they could learn fine motor control and probably enjoy themselves more.
Forcing people to handwrite both makes writing more laborious and takes away from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts. At minimum, when handwriting you can't go back and insert words or rearrange sentences to try out different ideas.
I do still think kids should learn how to write by hand, because it's culturally important. However, I think it could be emphasized somewhat less, and I don't think schools should teach cursive (which, anecdotally, I think is actually having a small resurgence in many schools).
It actually is difficult to find an exercise for developing fine motor control that is as complete and as cheap as practicing handwriting.
All other exercises would need more expensive tools and after inventing a sufficient number of different patterns for other activities, that would be practically equivalent with writing a different alphabet on another medium than paper, e.g. carving wood or stone, etc.
I did not like to use handwriting for things like taking notes at school or at the university, and I switched to typewriting as soon as I could afford a computer. For work purposes I now use only typewriting.
Despite this, I am very grateful that in the first years of school I was forced to practice handwriting, even if I have abandoned decades ago the style of handwriting that I was taught.
The reason is exactly what the previous poster has said, that this practice of handwriting as a child was essential for developing the motor control that I needed later as an electronics engineer for soldering or for assembling and disassembling various miniature devices.
>from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts
for one it's not clear to that this is what is actually important in writing or unrelated. That's just a bias in a culture that systematically neglects embodied practice.
In Japan there's an increasing phenomenon of Kanji-illiteracy among the young. Turns out there is a close connection between writing them out, the order of strokes and the physical activity and the memorizing of meaning of the Kanji, just passive observation or digital input can't replicate. There's a reason calligraphy is such an important tradition. There's an inherent connection from your hand, to your working memory to the processing of symbolic meaning.
This mirrors the discourse you see in math. "Rote memorization, writing equations, isn't important, you need to be able to think" turns out it really isn't and countries that teach traditionally excel at math. We live in an educational culture of thinking-pilled people who disregard the physical world and practice with abysmal results.
1 reply →
Handwriting notes engages your spatial memory, which is incredibly powerful (see: the ancient method of loci/memory palace techniques)
There were times in college where I blanked on important information during an exam, but was able to recall it by visualizing the physical sheets I had written my notes on. I aced several infamously difficult classes like OChem and OChem 2 using that technique.
I’ve never found it possible to do that with typed notes.
I'm curious how many times you end up in the similar situations as an exam after you graduate from college.
I share your experience of remembering written notes while a student, but I also don't have any critical need to perfectly remember any of the notes I'm taking now so comparison points are scarce.
I still remember the code shape of methods, classes or screens I work the most on while programming, so I don't see it as bound to a specific medium. That's one reason why I use figjam or Miro type tools so much as well.
Visual and spacial memory are powerful for many of us, but the relation to handwriting and perfectly memorizing things isn't straightforward, and getting adapted tool will tremendously help IMHO.
Have you tried a virtual board, like Miro?
Not above commenter but I have. I have done OneNote, Miro, and several other canvas style apps. And for me it still just doesn’t click in my brain like writing it down.
I think like many things, it's not universally true. At least for me I'm a really slow writer (and poor spelling), that if I were to hand write notes in a lecture, I'd focus on writing and miss half of what is said, and fall behind to the point that something I was copying from the board gets wiped off.
Maybe typing isn't ideal, but it's the better of the 2 options for me.
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 are for you, not for other people to read.
More to the point, even if you type fast enough to transcribe the lecture (or you know steno or pen shorthand or whatever), transcribing simply doesn't do the job of note-taking. (I speak from direct experience -- I did audio transcription work for a few years, and I generally wouldn't have been able to pass a test on something I'd just finished transcribing, even after having gone back through to do proofreading/editing at the end. There was some degree of mental engagement with the substantive meaning of things in the moment, but it was largely a "pass-through" sort of activity, if that makes sense.)
The idea isn't to merely take down a record of what was said, but rather to integrate the concepts into your own understanding: What associations can be made with existing knowledge, can you demonstrate to yourself your understanding of an abstract by contriving examples of it, can you explain it to your grandma, do you have a clear model of its scope/boundaries/limits and of where it fits into its domain, do you know the why as well as the what, etc.
The part where we have to condense what we're hearing into something concise enough that we can keep up is a feature. For that reason I wouldn't really recommend transcribing the lecture and then making notes out of it later, either (ideally we should be reviewing and organizing the notes into a more structured / fleshed-out / pared-down (as needed) form later anyway, so it would just seem to add an extra step). I don't know what everyone's courses are like, though, so maybe that approach could be useful or necessary for someone.
(And of course the takeaway here is that, assuming my understanding of it is well-grounded, and provided there isn't truly something inherent to handwriting that makes it cognitively advantageous, typing should have the potential to be just as workable a medium.)
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.
2 replies →
You're not really addressing parent's point IMHO. They could totally be taking well summarized notes on their computer, and free more time to properly listen instead of scribing it painfully.
I'm sure people have anecdotes of students furiously typing down every word of a lecture, but that's the same point for people handwriting/half stenographing fast enough to do the same. The attitude isn't bound to the medium.
The only way I could make the system work for me was to study the material before the lecture. Then the lecture helped cement what I'd learnt and clarify any points I struggled on.
Riding a unicycle and coding are not complementary activities - you are multitasking. Writing is aligning different parts of your brain to the same task, perhaps it is just creating additional focus.
There is no logical connection between moving a pencil to construct letterforms and deciding what you want to say. They have traditionally happened together, because before computers (or to some extent before typewriters) there was no better way to do one without the other.
You think about words, those words become physical movements, those physical movements create a mark on paper, the brain reads those physical marks, which causes it to think about words, which become physical movements, which become physical marks, which are read, which causes...
I'm sure if you drove the unicycle through a trough of paint and then used it to make words you'd have a similar experience.
Yes, there is. The act of writing requires you to think about the words, focus on them, think about their shapes and how you must move your hands to form them. You are actively and methodically engaging with the vocabulary as you write the words down.
This is nowhere near the same as doing to completely unrelated activities at the same time.
That's completely the wrong analogy. It's fairly well established through studies that language acquisition in preliterate kids is improved through handwriting (as opposed to typing or tracing letters).
Yes, but that is a different kind of improvement compared to note king during a lecture as an adult. I think hadriting ability is important, I just don't think note taking dutin a lecture is useful in any way.
Anecdotally from only place where I have experienced both. When playing TTRPGs like Dungeon & Dragons when people fill their character sheets by hand they tend to remember their abilities, features, and spells much better than people who use a fillable PDF and print it out. Even same person with fillable sheet will have to read through it constantly versus them writing it up by hand.
Probably chunk of that is copying vs interpreting, meaning just writing the rule as written vs rewording it to make it more concise and fit your brain, but also part of it definitely is it you remembering where you wrote something down instead of having to scan through bunch of stuff just to find the place you need.
When designing a character on a computer, you play around with many options, until you settle on one of them. Since you did exactly the same thing for all those variants, it's difficult to remember which one you ultimately picked. Writing down the final result by hand helps distinguish it from the alternatives in your mind.
That's very different from academic lectures, where you are directly told the facts, and not a multitude of equally valid alternatives.
If you are just copy pasting off of the board then probably. Hard to say since I have not had experience with both methods in this context.
I still think writing by hand makes stuff stick better especially if you are one of those 500 wpm typists where very little thought goes into typing and it is more like a reflex
1 reply →
The studies I'm familiar with have tested recall at various intervals, not brain activity.
> I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
If lots of people said they code better while riding a unicycle, I'm not sure I'd just dismiss it off hand.
No but I want real evidence. Lots of people say they are more productive with vi than a GUI editor but depending on the task a real study can show one or the other is more productive. You see this all over - expensive audio cables sound better than cheap...
It probably depends on the task. I find that writing things out by hand is extremely helpful for memorizing.
I share the skepticism, I feel you could probably pull up a bunch of random examples like walking being better for you than driving somewhere at a short distance but it's just not practical for long hauls and so they are definitely pointing to tangible benefits but maybe taking them out of context (enthusiasts for handwriting over typing pointing to real benefuts of writing but maybe ignoring how this can slow you down in impractical ways for greater speed and movement, etc.)
The problem is you immediately assume studies haven’t thought of that
Do you know that is how simplistic these studies actually are?
Well, it's not only my criticism. For example, here is one on the very study TFA links: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
A lot of education research is shockingly bad. (And, to be clear, a lot of it is also really good!)
False equivalence, the writing is always closely related to what you are thinking about.
The unicycle and FizzBuzz is (hopefully!!) not related.
A better scenario with FizzBuzz would maybe be writing down a sequence of numbers at the same time.
For myself, a significant difference is that writing a single word longhand "feels like" a single long unified action whereas typing a word "feels like" several short distinct actions. The motor-sensory action of writing matches that of speaking a bit more closely than typing, especially if you're a scribbler. OTOH I suspect typing is better cognitively for transcriptions, meeting minutes, etc., where deep understanding is unnecessary. I am sure you can cook up a study that proves or negates any one of these suspicions.
Sometimes I get benefit taking notes on a computer, e.g. I read Wittgenstein with notes in org-mode, took lots of notes about software/CS directly in the comments of the program implementing the ideas, etc etc.
As a pianist, typing a word kinda feels like playing a phrase on piano, which isn't that different from writing a word by hand. I suspect this is highly dependent on your experience.
This is pretty easy to prove via experiment, no?
1. Pick any topic,
2. purely reading,
3. try to write about it
I find myself "thinking" I understood something a lot more than I want to admit.
> universal theory of learning.
There is no such thing. Presumably there is a person who concentrates on algorithmic problems better while riding a unicycle. To the best of my knowledge the research shows people do not learn in the same way, although our hardware is more or less the same. The trick is to recognise what works for you, and only way to find it out is bu trying different things. Most people who succeed at all in higher education become experts on how they themselves learn best, simply because you won’t learn multivariable calculus, become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, or become an expert in late medieval poetry without trying every trick in the book to ram all that information into your brain.
Saying that, there is things that work for _most people_, active recall being probably the most universal one. Which simply means that if you do something a lot with a lot of repetition, you will eventually get quite good at it.And the probably is something in hand writing that forces you to actively engage with information processed better than typing for most/many people.
Personally, I have also noticed the better I get at touch typing the smaller this gap in enforcing learning by writing by had versus typing comes. That is purely anecdotal of course, but when we forced all the kids to use laptops to learn, did we teach them how to type properly first? Or to use computers in general? Or did we just gave them Chromebooks and said “good luck kiddo”?
I personally hate handwriting. My handwriting is ugly and slow, and I keep making annoying mistakes that I can’t fix. It’s generally a terrible experience.
If given the choice I’ll always type.
> 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 is an astoundingly bad comparison and I think you know how invalid it is. Doing two separate unrelated activities at the same time is not the same as engaging more parts of your brain by focusing on a single task.
You’re right in that what works for one might not work for others, but your argument is dishonest at best.
I mean, be skeptical all you want, but at least TRY it.
I know I retain more if I handwrite notes. It's my lived experience, so that's what I do in meetings, generally. These notes get transcribed back into some orderly data store for later reference, but the initial notes are pen and paper.
Oh, I can tell you for myself that handwriting is awful. I'm focused entirely on the process of writing and can't think about anything else. When I type I feel like I can move at the speed of my brain.
Or... Hear me out... Don't take notes at all. I'm sure I can find supporting material that is just much better than my paltry notes. I find that for me, it detracts from engaging with the material. I just much better prefer to listen and engage and think what is being said.
I only take notes if I am trying to work out some of the things said or as support for this or that or maybe 2 really interesting lines or quips I want to remember just so later and I find particularly surprising or interesting (or mistaken, hah).
When solving math problems, yes, by all means take notes! I find writing with a pen indispensable because it's much more flexible and expressive. And i need the memory caching that writing provides.
Indeed, the research is just laughable on its face, and of course it doesn't address the real issue - proving that all that extra brain involvement is positive, but hey, the author has already invested in the fountain pens, needs to prove it was the right choice!
[dead]