Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

One aspect the article doesn&#x27;t mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing.<p>As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world.<p>This effect is also something I&#x27;ve experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa - going back in memory to a particular location immediately makes me start hearing memories from the book passages I listened to in that location!<p>I think this aspect is at play a lot with handwriting as well. You are always writing in tangible places inside a notebook, while when typing things on the computer there is less of an immediate spatial location of each note. In any case that location will both be mostly the same for all notes (you sitting at the computer), and regarding any virtual spatiality of you computer desktop system, that will have a less tangible connection with your senses, (although any sense of spatiality surely can help a bit).

&gt; It’s not eco-friendly<p>I&#x27;m actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook &quot;costs&quot; trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it&#x27;s biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn&#x27;t break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...

This is one of the reasons I&#x27;ve started to use the reMarkable tablet for taking notes. Sometimes I don&#x27;t even look at them again, it&#x27;s just a more efficient way to get the info into my head.<p>I wrote more about my current workflow&#x2F;stack here if anyone is interested (w&#x2F; some reMarkable hacks): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briandoll.medium.com&#x2F;personal-setup-for-getting-shit-done-in-2021-b6bdef7ad7f0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briandoll.medium.com&#x2F;personal-setup-for-getting-shit...</a>

I think this post just barely misses the main reason which, in my opinion, makes writing a better medium for remembering. They mention that typing is faster and easier than writing but I think the real reason this impacts memory is because you have to reduce things into their smallest form in order to keep up (with the person speaking or your own thoughts). This act of condensing makes you internalize the words into concepts, and concepts are easier to recall.

I never knew why I unconsciously chose analog over digital in those cases, but it turns out there&#x27;s a scientific explanation. When we write, we make our brains go through an abstraction process - separating something from a whole to analyze it by itself.- According to neurologist Audrey Van Der Meer, &quot;It seems that keyboards and pens bring into play different underlying neurological processes. This may not be surprising since handwriting&#x2F;drawing is a complex task that requires the integration of various skills.&quot;<p>I wrote a full article about it in the link above.

Key quote:<p>&gt; This cognitive effort of condensing and translating into your own words is what facilitates learning. Which is why you could still do this with typing, but it&#x27;s easy to avoid the cognitive effort of translating and condensing (and we tend toward cognitive laziness) and just type it verbatim because you can keep up.<p>When I type notes (all the way back to college), it is in one ear, out the other (onto the page). The act of physically writing it down, and potentially a second pass to clean up the notes, is almost all I ever need to get something into working memory. Back in college, the third time I would look at my notes would be the morning of the test where I would just glance through them. Seeing the general shape of the text was often enough to trigger the recall.

I find that it also helps me get over things.<p>If there&#x27;s something that I&#x27;m obsessing over or simply cannot get off my mind, I can write it down and it will go away. Throwing the piece of paper is optional.<p>I think writing puts some kind of structure to your mental model, you process it at the time of writing and can move on to the next thing while preserving the output of the processing. The output tends to be some kind of map about where you can find it and short description about the nature of the thing you write down.<p>It&#x27;s almost as if you put the stuff of your &quot;hot memory&quot;, the memory that is about the main process you operate on, into your visual memory.<p>For some reason, typing on a computer doesn&#x27;t have the same effect. It does have some effect but it&#x27;s different.

Something I&#x27;ve learned is that if you&#x27;re a disorganized person, you&#x27;re going to have a disorganized computer, and disorganized notes. But with physical notes, I can put them in a physical pile, and they&#x27;ll pretty much stay there until I need them, sometimes for years.<p>Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don&#x27;t care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Scanning is easy. My cell phone is a good enough scanner.<p>Where paper shines is equations and drawings. I&#x27;m building an elaborate electronic circuit as a hobby project right now. The ease of drawing the schematics by hand outpaces any drawing program, and it&#x27;s effortless to carry paper into my workshop. Of all places, Target sells a lovely quad ruled notebook where one side of each sheet is 4 grids per inch, and the other side 5.<p>Now I&#x27;ve read a lot of comments and articles about pens. Uggh. Pens are just not my friend. I&#x27;ve struck a blow for freedom and bought pencils. There, I said it. Lots of them. I know all the cool kids write with pens, but my handwriting is so horrible, I usually have to erase my worst scribbles and start over quite frequently.

Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to &quot;write the notes by hand, then type them out later&quot;.<p>This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.

I have a really hard time writing down notes while things are going on. I have very good memory but if I&#x27;m taking notes while something is happening, I often don&#x27;t remember anything other than writing it down. If I don&#x27;t take notes, my memory of events, topics and discussions is often far better. Writing things down post facto also does not help me much, other than I know where I wrote it.<p>However I find the act of discussing a topic helps cement things. For me, the engagement with a subject is what really helps me remember things, and I suspect writing notes removes that.

I think there&#x27;s a critical element missing from these experiments: transcribing information vs storing knowledge.<p>When you&#x27;re transcribing things (writing down as you hear or see it), you&#x27;re normally not involved in learning or remembering the information; merely writing it down. In this case, handwriting would help to remember it later since writing on autopilot a more involved process than typing on autopilot.<p><i>HOWEVER</i>, when it comes to writing down <i>KNOWLEDGE</i>, it&#x27;s a very different experience. This is why I always advocate to think before you type, and why less than 10% of my time spent developing software involves actually touching the keys on my keyboard. A live coding session with me would be extremely boring; 10 minutes of me staring into space, followed by 1 minute of dumping the code into the source file. But I&#x27;m very productive; my projects on github, sourceforge and sunsite speak for themselves.<p>From the point that I entered college onwards, I&#x27;ve barely handwritten a paragraph of text per year (going on 25 years). I noticed no difference in cognition or memory then, nor do I now. Re-reading things I&#x27;ve typed in the past bring the whole experience flooding back the same as is expressed in the article as a handwriting experience. But then again, I&#x27;m not transcribing; I&#x27;m writing down knowledge.

The Brain That Changes Itself. Life changing book. One of the surprising studies there shows how kids with all kinds of learning disabilities can be radically transformed just by being given cursive handwriting exercises. Brain development and activation under handwriting is measurable, and very different from typing or even printing.

I find typing perfectly adequate for <i>remembering</i> things - in school if I was copying out notes I did just as well typing as handwritten, and could do it faster (and so get more repetition in) on a computer. Both blew away just reading or listening passively.<p>However, for brainstorming or planning, which is a lot of what this article is talking about, the unbounded spatial component of paper (or a drawing app with stylus) is much better for me than the constrained nature of a word processor. Something like graphviz isn&#x27;t bad for certain types of things, but anything that relies on mouse-based selection and dragging of things breaks my flow in a way that jotting a new note off to the edge of an open paper doesn&#x27;t.

<i>maybe</i><p>It certainly seems plausible to me, in my personal experience, but this article is talking about something that <i>may</i> be true.<p>This is another headline that is planting an idea in casual reader’s heads without explicitly mentioning it is in large part anecdotal and speculative.

Anyone interested in writing faster and with less hand strain should look into fountain pens. With a quality nib, that doesn&#x27;t scratch&#x2F;catch the paper one can continuously write for hours at decent speed. I usually do the first draft of anything I need to write by hand with a fountain pen as it allows me to get out my thoughts without the distractions of editing. You can cross out your work, but it is still there to go back to, or incorporate in later edits (done at the computer). Plus you can draw out ideas that you can&#x27;t immediately put into words, when words fail you.<p>Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.

I find hand written lists are good for focusing, but if I&#x27;m in a store hours later shopping for a group of disparate objects (10 ft ladder, size 5 2.5 inch screws, plant pot etc etc) I find a digital list invaluable because I can remove the items I have got so far leaving a shorter list. I&#x27;ve found that unless I strike out items I somehow miss something on a long list. I know you can do this with a pen too but I&#x27;ve gone from wunderlist to the various google phone list tools and find them v useful

This is a particular research paper on taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand, and how notes are transcribed. They conclude that longhand is better than the taking notes on laptops. Pretty popular paper.<p>(The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard) [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linguistics.ucla.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;hayes&#x2F;Teaching&#x2F;papers&#x2F;MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linguistics.ucla.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;hayes&#x2F;Teaching&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Mu...</a>]

I had a task at work today where I had to go to pen and paper first in order to get myself moving forward on it. Not exactly the point of the OP, but it was a different kind of enabling factor.<p>I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head.<p>So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits!<p>As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing.<p>To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!

I personally use more or less 3 stages. 1. whiteboard and marker - explore ideas, big-picture thinking, fast iterations. 2. paper notebook - things that emerged from point 1 are more precisely recorded into a paper notebook. Things go much slower here, especially because the eraser or the paper burns out quite quickly and there is no point to keep pointless notes. The structure of the paper is quite important as well. I noticed blank paper does not work that well and I spent more space there with less structure. Linked paper is also not good. Square paper is better. But the best one for me is dotted paper. Ideal compromise between structure and freedom. 3. everything that survives stage 2 goes to real code and git logs. Here the structure is maximal. Keeping notes in the code is of course good way as well as extensive git comments.

I disagree. Writing is helpful for thinking things through, but the writing itself doesn’t do anything. I used to take a lot of notes to remember things and it can just act as an excuse to not think hard. It’s the hard thought and periodic review that cements things

In my case at least, I noticed that remembering things has a strong &quot;visual&quot; component. I have nothing close to a photographic memory (I wish), but for example in university, I often remembered facts and formulas by also remembering where on a page they were. I wouldn&#x27;t quite &quot;read it off&quot; the page in my mind, but just the visualization of the page helped getting to the fact, in a &quot;oh yeah, that&#x27;s where that was written down&quot; kind of way.<p>Today, I write down the most important dates and facts on pieces of paper or a little notebook, and just the strong, vivid, very visual recollection of me writing it down (and where) helps tremendously in remembering what was written down.

I handwrite my todo list at the start of everyday and scribble notes down when I’m in meetings and almost never look at them again. It definitely helps solidify things in my head for whatever reason. I’m not uptight or anything, it just seems to help me.

I got a tablet with a pen from a popular South Korean company and I love it precisely because it serves as a great alternative to typing. I take notes for class with its native app. This format works for me because I love paper notes but can&#x27;t get over how hard it is to organize my chaotic style. Having it all located and organized on in a single object I can pick up any time is amazing. Lots of potential there but what is available already has led me to replace pen and paper with digital handwritten notes and papers. I live with limited space so this saves on space and allows me to maintain an easily searchable database of my work.

When I was in high school in Montréal, waaay back in 1995, our French teacher would tell us “qui écrit, lit deux fois” (“the one who writes, reads twice”), as a motto to encourage us to copy the texts we read via handwriting, instead of really just reading. And I can attest that it works really well. I remember a lot more when I write. On the surface, it’s slower; but in really, if I took the same amount of time to only re-read the same material without copying, I still wouldn’t remember as much.

I personally really enjoy the world of GTD (Getting Things Done). I like reading about the best techniques, latest to-do apps and I tried a lot of them over the years.<p>But in practice, for whatever reason, the only to-do lists that I complete are the ones I quickly write down on a random piece of paper sitting on my desk.<p>Even though digital notes have many more advantages and I would like to use them, they just never work for me. I forget to periodically check them and if they send me notifications I simply ignore them.

&gt;All of this makes me believe we need more time for our brains to adapt to writing on glass, or technology needs to advance enough so that writing on tablets feels like writing in a notebook.<p>This strikes me as implausible. Did the earliest paper-writers (or parchment writers) not get the same benefit because their brains were adapted for cuneiform on clay tablets?

For me it does in a way, but I still need to read my notes while the details are still fresh in my mind. The main reason is I&#x27;m a sloppy writer and I might not be able to make out my mess if I haven&#x27;t reviewed it enough. Also, for small things like passwords, saying them 10 times helps me get over &#x27;what was that again&#x27; hump.

Current generations may perform better in various ways while handwriting because we grew up being forced to write by hand for many years while we were developing in childhood. I wonder if upcoming generations that grow up typing instead will perform the same way, or if they’ll do better taking typewritten notes.

I like pen and paper because it&#x27;s secure. It&#x27;s an unhackable, hard to forge tamper evident record.<p>There&#x27;s a stupid number of problems where the easiest answer is &quot;pen and paper&quot; because while it&#x27;s hard to make redundant, it&#x27;s completely security auditable.

I always assumed this is because of the extra brain power used for your hands. When you write the tactile sensation, the pressure, the texture all activate different parts of your brain. My assumption was more activation means more opportunity for memorization.

Our biology teacher told us to not bring the text book. He wrote and drew everything on the blackboard, and we had to copy it by writing it down.<p>Never had to learn anythings, and I still remember 90% of it, even visually.<p>Remember that the great ones wrote a lot.

Agree. I just passed a certificate by writing down all my study material for the past three weeks. It&#x27;s a lot, but the <i>act of writing things down</i> really helps cement info into my brain.

For me, I differentiate between note taking &amp; note archiving. The latter is best done electronically. The former is best done by hand for many reasons stated by the author.

I endure a fair amount of ridicule around my use of pen and paper but have known instinctively for some time that it is far better for many use cases, in practical terms.

If you are in Canada, you can go to Dollarama and get sketch notebook with ring binding for $4, and a gel pen. No lines easy to flip pages and a smooth pen. Perfection.

Relevant: <i>The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better</i> by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee.

I don&#x27;t even ever read back what I wrote. But I find I need to write down something to actually remember it.<p>So it does fit with my experience.

&gt; We could transcribe real-time audio with our eyes closed and still be pretty accurate.<p>umm, overstating the case a bit on average.

<i>Qui scribit bis legit</i>

I do the opposite of what this author does. Digital feels more at home

I found that out taking notes in college. It&#x27;s pretty obvious :-)

I love note taking on paper; the problem is finding my notes later.

what the heck is &quot;digital handwriting&quot;?

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The sound of writing with a wood-cased pencil is very soothing. Currently I&#x27;m using a MITSU-BISHI 9800 with my absolute favorite being the CARAN D&#x27;ACHE Swiss Wood red tip.