I’ve had mixed success typing things verbatim vs hand writing verbatim.<p>When learning to program, I found typing out code samples had a similar effect to writing them out by hand, and felt more natural to the domain. But in other subjects in school, it felt like my comprehension was lower when I typed lecture notes instead of handwriting them. I was never sure whether that was something inherent to hand writing vs typing or it was just because I had more of a barrier between typing and thinking than I did with handwriting.<p>It always seemed clear that the value of writing something verbatim was that it forced your brain to internalize it in a way you don’t need to when reading. It takes longer to hand write than to type — maybe that is the value of hand writing vs typing? Or when typing I needed to think more about the act of typing, whether that was thinking about formatting/positioning or just being less natural than handwriting? Maybe programming is just a special case where you always think through typing?<p>I lean towards thinking it’s somewhat domain specific. Clearly with physics or math if you had to typeset equations with LaTeX that would get in the way, and typing would be a barrier to understanding. With programming, every idea is expressed through typing, and so typing is a natural way to imprint ideas on your brain.
I do a form of this when I want to learn a new codebase. I force myself to write out on paper every class/datamember/method declaration in the file and give a one line summary of what I think it does, as well as I can from the code itself. I am often completely wrong about what the function does but still get huge benefits in understanding the scope of the whole thing.
Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. A lot of anecdotes about “important” historical figures or institutions that use copy by hand as a method for learning.<p>I would have preferred citing actual research, not an appeal to historical methods.<p>Given that some of the conclusions that word for word copy may be less efficient than summarized copy[1], it may be a less efficient and less effective way of learning than going through a reading and summarizing every paragraph.<p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...</a>
Like any of this kind of advice, I think there are 2 ways of doing it: robotically and mindfully. If the latter is done, then I think it may have some use. If the former, then it's similar to the argument of listening to learning material before going to sleep - of dubious effectiveness.
I'm naturally sceptical because I hated being forced to pointlessly take "notes" as a child (I always felt like they were more intended as a way for teachers to secure their own ass). It took me 20 years to start writing my own notes again. (...on an e-ink device. I guess I'll just hate paper forever. This is that school does to people.)<p>Anyway, I'd love to see some research comparing, for example, the retention gained by writing stuff out by hand, to just reading the material multiple times until an equivalent amount of time has passed. It seems possible to me that what The Suck achieves is forcing you to slow down and take some time to absorb the information, but the method doesn't seem efficient/optimal in principle.
Hunter S. Thompson claimed to have typed out The Great Gatsby several times on a manual typewriter. Definitely makes you pay close attention to the structure of phrases and sentences.
When I was around 17 years old I started preparing for my exams by writing out the material I read.<p>Say it was very effective from retention/ memorization perspective but very inefficient in terms of how long it took.<p>I became dependent on this method for my preparation though. Which ...sucked I guess. Often felt like a handicap when I needed to quickly go through some material for review.
Just a personal experience, but the enforcement of this practise at my school had a real detrimental effect on my learning.<p>I have very bad vision which wasn't picked up for various reasons, so learning to write did not go smoothly (my handwriting is and always has been barely legible). So being forced to write out everything I learned by hand was a real bottleneck for me.<p>Things went a lot better after I discovered touch typing, and nowadays I learn best via keyboard shortcuts and typed commands.
The only major downside I see to this is preserving and quick retrieval of knowledge. It's a well known fact that many luminaries over the course of several centuries had systems similar to a Zettlekasten, most notably, Niklas Luhmann, the prolific sociologist apparently had several thousand index cards preserving info.<p>While it's commendable, it should also be noted that all this was done prior to the information age we're living in. These are physical objects that at the end of the day take up sizeable space in your house, gather dust, need cleaning/dusting etc. And you can't throw a computer at the problem of search and retrieval, at least yet.<p>I wish there was more research into active learning by typing as well. Typing does force you to think, especially if you don't type something you learn verbatim but actively try to process info and possibly summarize it in your own words.
This is what he’s referring to from Gary Halbert (at least one of the more famous examples of Gary telling students to write out ads)<p><a href="https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/</a>
I've studied math books this way. Never a whole book, but certainly sections or chapters here and there. I found it gave me a much improved appreciation for the high level structure of the material (or at least of it's presentation).
I wonder if writing by hand is the optimal output speed we can have, given our biological bodies. The information throughput (both in and out) are quite limited, we can only afford so much bandwidth. Anything beyond that and we lose some information. Writing by hand seems to be the optimal bandwidth that engages self-reflection simultaneously. Typing is good too, but I often find myself "think more" about what I'm writing if I do it by hand vs. if I type it.
at University I would copy all the notes I took, which were poorly written and confused, into nice hand-written notes with charts, plots and formulas. That was for all the courses, for 7 years.<p>I think it's a powerful way to learn and remember, but requires some time and effort. Alas, I am not doing it very much nowadays, but that's also because my learning is much less structured and much more "operational" (I need to learn this in order to do that).<p>Edit: typos
"These are... [the] originals?? The showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. It's simply written down music that was already finished in his head. As if he were *taking dictation*."<p>I wrote C code by hand. Mind you, I wasn't typing it nor copying it from anywhere. I was writing it, by hand, from my head. Hear me out...<p>I was on the collegiate ACM programming team with Russ Cox and Matt Caywood. The format was you were given like 6 puzzles, 4 hours, and one terminal. Russ insisted we follow this process:<p>1) One person picks the easiest and gets the terminal.<p>2) Other two teammates choose two other puzzles and each of us would write our code, by hand, pen and paper. ("The <i>New York Times</i> crossword puzzle is a form of meditation. But doing it in pen if pencil is available is grandstanding." - Glenn O'Brien, from _How to be a Man_)<p>3) When one was finished, we would acquire the lock on the terminal from the other teammate, transcribe our code, and hit run with our fingers crossed. No collaboration. No cross-talk.<p>4) Repeat until victory is achieved and your competitors are decimated. (We laughed with no small amount of schadenfreude that the MIT team lost in the regionals because they all stood around their sole terminal, imcomprehensibly bickering at each other.)<p>We got 8th place in the world, so---uhm---thank you Russ for the joy and pain? I wouldn't recommand to any CS student that this slow form of torture is necessary by any means to assert that you are damn fine coder. But, GOD DAMN you feel like a beast when you type C into a terminal, run compile, and it works with no bugs.<p>You get a special satisfaction of bravura and elan that would reduce Salieri to tears reading the scripts of Mozart and realizing there were zero hand-writing errors. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJ0QyiI68c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJ0QyiI68c</a> (This is historically apocryphal, but makes for great screenwriting.)<p>Through this rigor, you learn something very valuable, albeit something you might learn in more conventional and less tedious ways: You learn always---at least in those fleeting moments---to write <i>correct</i> code <i>at the optimal level of conciseness</i>. Because you simply don't have the time to fiddle around the way you might if you have a fast wpm typing rate, since you write slower than you think. And learn to think faster than you can write.<p>I guess this is similar to the form of discipline you would get when you programmed punch cards and sent them via post, except under time pressure it was blitz chess than punch-card postal chess.<p>And don't get me wrong. I use Jupyter notebooks and putz around a lot these days. I'm too old for some shit, and putzing around is fun.
This is obviously brain-structure dependent. I for one would take 10x more time to learn python if some teacher decided that the best way to do it is to write out python by hand on paper for instance. (But this probably does work well for some brains, maybe more towards 'word rotatators'.)
I let out a groan when I got to the word "Zettlekasten". Then a sigh of relief when I got to "private coaching of Neo-intellectuals" because I realized the article was obviously satirical.<p>Only it wasn't.
This guy needs a copy editor. The meandering writing is off putting when someone is writing on the subject of becoming efficient at a task or process. He is in love with his own writing, maybe considering it entertainment, which he proclaims not to do.