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Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

It seems plausible, studies have shown that students who handwrite notes retain more information than students that type notes. The reason for this is because handwriting is slower than typing, so your mind spends more time thinking about what you're writing, vs just being a stenographer that writes everything the professor says, giving no thought to whether it's important or not. I can't speak to the validity of Sans Forgetica, but on the surface it at least makes sense.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...

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You are speculating without evidence. Handwriting may be more effective for memorization than typing because forming letters by hand is a more memorable act than typing, nothing to do with "choosing what's important to write". Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more.

You can test this yourself by making a fair comparision:

* Copy entire documents by handwriting vs typing, with no regard to choosing "what's important", and test which strategy leads to better recall.

* Take notes from a lecture by handwriting vs typing, setting a goal of say 10% of the total material note-taken, choosing what's important to write down, and giving yourself as much time as needed to write or tye everything

* Similar comparisons, writing all vs writing selections, typing all vs typying selectionsl

"Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more."

A bit in undergrad but quite a lot in grad school, I ended up stopping taking notes. I discovered I was better off engaging completely in class, and consulting the textbooks if necessary, than trying to multitask learning and taking notes. YMMV; I can easily believe there are people who had the exact opposite experience, that note taking radically improved their retention. I'm just saying that such experience is definitely not universal.

I was the same way for the most part, I'd skip taking notes unless a teacher was making a very important point that I knew I wouldn't remember or wouldn't be able to look up later. But most of the time if it was important the teacher wouldn't just say it once and never touch on it again!

Sure it seems plausible, but from "plausible" to "scientifically" there is IMHO a huge leap.

It may make sense, and personally I hope/wish that it actually works as intended, but that's far from being OK with the font to be tagged as it is.

Even the paper mentioned in the article you linked to that should be this one (the original link in the article is to SAGE journals and I cannot access it):

https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...

seems like proposing a theory that makes a lot of sense more than anything else.

> The reason for this is because handwriting is slower than typing, so your mind spends more time thinking about what you're writing

Yeah, but this is about a typeface that's intentionally harder to read, not write.

I agree with the idea that handwriting notes is more beneficial, to a degree. I prefer taking notes by hand, but once I reach a certain threshold (over 3 pages, usually) , I need to organize the notes digitally.

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