The benefits of note-taking by hand
bbc.com
bbc.com
From a retention/recall perspective, I think most people are enamored with finding the perfect note-taking method because we want to find the one method that optimizes both retention (memory) + recall (long term searchability) at the same time. It seems to me these two objectives are somewhat in competition.
(there's also comprehension and thinking but I see those as separate)
I think splitting up the two objectives makes more sense. Handwriting notes enhances memory formation, but is less optimized for searchability. Digital notes are great for long-term searchability, but are weaker for memory formation.
Why not have two systems instead of one? Just handwrite whatever you want to remember, and type whatever you want to stash away? It seems inefficient, but in multiobjective optimization we usually end up with Pareto optimality rather than a single point of optimality.
One might ask, how would I know a priori what to remember and what to stash? I personally prefer handwriting, so I'll usually go there first and if I need to stash it I'll retype it into Google Docs. That said, I'll hop on Google Docs first if it happens to be more convenient (like if I'm browsing and want to copy-and-paste something for long-term storage, or if I'm outdoors and all I have on me is my phone)
Meetings are a great candidate for handwriting notes -- and then discarding. You and I know that most meeting notes are throwaways. Despite that, I personally find that in complex multiparty meetings, I'm able to follow the flow better if I continuously take notes. Being able to remember who said what, and being able to summarize a meeting are all very valuable skills to have.
(p.s. with regard to memory, Socrates didn't even believe in writing -- he believed writing things down would weaken our memories in the long term. He believed that talking about things was a far superior way to form memories and to understand subjects deeply. He's not completely wrong about the role of discussion and disputation [emotional connection is a potent force in memory formation], but all the same I'm glad Plato didn't take to this thinking and actually wrote stuff down).
So, of course, I’ve tried the Remarkable pad, as well as apps like Goodnotes on iPad that try to support handwriting while also supporting search. Goodnotes suited my needs better, as the Remarkable pad latency was too high, though I did prefer the feel of writing. Apple materials research needs to get their glass and pencil closer to this.
However, for recall, I find there’s something about the physicality of a paper notebook that gives the facts a place to live.
With real x, y, and z dimensions in space, perhaps paper notebooks offer a fine grained version of the “memory palace” method of storing facts for in-memory browsing and recall.
Digital notebooks as well as digital books on Kindle lack the physical depth of the relevant page. It seems likely a visual “depth” indicator would assist recall of information in e-books. Unclear how that would work in digital notepads unless they had a fixed quantity of “pages”.
Aside from this loss of physical memory mapping, iOS 14’s handwriting to text is compelling. One gets to write notes out by hand, exercising that pathway, but what ends up on the page is real text. Haven’t played with this long enough to have any opinion on whether this transformation defeats recall.
The iPad writing experience can be greatly improved with a matte screen protector that has a paper-like finish.
I think that's correct. On 'Moonwalking with Einstein', the author mentions that placing a memory somewhere will help. Like, listening to podcasts while you walk around, and stuff like that. Maybe because you use different physical notebooks, your brain remembers better
Like, I used to listen to podcasts while driving to my GFs town, or driving home. I remember way more what I listened while driving, than while in my bed. In fact, for a few things, I remember where I was when X thing was being discussed.
If true, I can imagine with physical note books that roughly the same thing applies.
In my case, I pretty much now know what kind goes where. For the "planning" kind - these are TODOs, movie and reading lists, project ideas, project subtasks -they go into a tool like Notion, or Google Keep if they are very simple transient lists. What I need here are: the ability to search, modify in place (not strike-throughs), and access on any device (so this s/w typically is cloud-enabled). The last aspect is needed because I need a way to accommodate ad-hoc ideas into a larger pre-existing plan, when I am travelling and I just have my phone, or a different laptop.
When I am reading a paper, or watching a lecture, I strongly prefer handwritten notes. I have experimented with standard notebooks, moleskins, having a "two-level" system: one notebook for quick notes, and another one for well-formed versions of notes from the first one, and finally, taking notes on loose foolscaps and adding them to a folder. The last one has stuck, mostly because I don't have to worry about "wasting" pages with ill-formed notes; I can choose not to add it to the folder. Also I can change organization at a later date. For this category of notes, I am looking for: the handwriting experience, the ability to arbitrarily format and color things (very helpful for technical material that need diagrams).
PS: the article links to some ways of structuring notes, which seem interesting.
There are a few different approaches.
1. The traditional one where you take fast handwritten notes in whatever semi-shorthand scrawl you use. If you're used to doing this you can usually capture enough close to verbatim to write a story.
2. The same thing with typing. This has a couple of advantages. It's mostly faster and I can form the core of a story pretty quickly with some cutting and pasting.
3. Record and take more limited notes (and optionally use one of the AI services to transcribe). This will typically give you the best accuracy but, because you find yourself having to refer back to the original audio and just have to deal with more material, it takes more time.
If I need to write something to stash, as you say, it's usually for other people as well when at work. There I have no choice, it's either the wiki or a google doc and I'll polish up my hand written notes and diagrams. On the rare occasion I want to write something to keep for myself it'll either be some sort of markdown document on my drive, or a draft post on my blog if it 's more general musings. Usually I'll hand write notes in a meeting, that way I can leave the laptop at my desk (pre-covid), and then I'll write up a more coherent document later on if needed.
Pencil and paper is just great, I can do whatever I want, I can rub it out and start again, and the semi-permanance makes me care slightly less about it being perfect. I can't move the notes onto another page unless I re-write them, so sometimes I do if I really need to and otherwise I just move on.
I did end up spending out on some pencils that feel nice to use, but it's a tiny expense compared to subscriptions for many of the note apps out there.
I hate handwriting meeting notes! The only way they become useful is if they're saved and searchable (to refer back to weeks or months later), and since they're only sometimes useful, taking the extra time to transcribe is annoying. I can also type faster than I can (legibly) handwrite. So it makes more sense for me to skip the extra step.
Aside, I actually find the metadata (who, when, and broad topics) is what I'm usually looking for. Anything immediate gets on my to-do list, or becomes a ticket, or is part of a bigger project I'm actively working on anyway.
About the only thing I hand write anymore is actually my to-do list. I've tried dozens of apps and other methods, but always give up after a while. I use a 4x6 sticky note pad, and the killer feature is it gets full every couple days. This forces me to tear it off and start over, re-writing anything still active. After doing this with the same items for long enough, I either have to do them or admit they're not important anymore (or important enough) and drop them.
Physically crossing stuff off and throwing away the old sticky notes is kind of cathartic.
Me personally, I never transcribe my handwritten notes -- that would be too much work. But I do keep them in an unorganized pile (they're just loose sheets). If I ever needed to retrieve a note, I'll rifle through the pile and I can usually find what I need in 1-2 minutes (I don't attend THAT many meetings). It's not the most organized approach, but it's lightweight and it works for me. Paper isn't exactly unsearchable, merely less searchable than digital. (After all human civilization did exist before computers :)
But typing up meeting notes in software works fine and has its advantages, especially if there's a need to share them or to follow-up on them.
Just the default Apple notes app recognizes my cursive well enough to make my notes searchable and I don't feel any slower than with a traditional pen.
It's a nicer experience than I'd been expecting, TBH.
[0] see table on page 45 in https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
Mental notes < written notes < SRS < repeated exposure + emotional connection.
Specifically around retention (and only retention), taking notes doesn't get you everything, but it gets you something.
(I do feel some of us put undue focus on taking notes at the expense of understanding the world through empirical means, but that's another discussion. I'm focusing solely on retention here.).
Active recall testing and distributed practice are great ideas. No disagreement there. (the Ebbinghaus curve is well known)
(also, thanks for the link to the publication -- those are interesting results that describe aggregate outcomes for the population studied, but there's usually variation in individual outcomes, and in self-selected groups like this one, a different subset of techniques may dominate)
To your point about Anki specifically, I'm a language learner and in my experience, flashcard-style SRS can help retention for atomic types of knowledge, but I find as I get to intermediate levels of a language, the utility of flashcards declines precipitously -- because one is called upon to synthesize structures rather than just words.
So far I haven't found an easy way to encode structures into flashcards (clozes etc are too simplistic)... furthermore, language learning is complicated by the need to acquire a "feeling" for the context of how certain words are used. It's a kind of tacit knowledge that sometimes defies simple flashcard-type encodings. You can encode context through narrative, but then your flashcards become too unwieldy.
I've found writing and speaking (with feedback) in small chunks over a long period of time to be much better at creating the "neurocircuitry" necessary for retention. Again, I wouldn't say flashcard SRS are bad at improving retention (I use them), but like taking notes, even if they don't get you all the way there, they get you somewhere.
I've seen some interesting approaches around flashcards for mathematical concepts applied to sets of mathematical problems. I've experimented with the idea where a flashcard might ask me about algorithms in a way that challenges me to apply a specific algorithm to solve a problem or think about its properties and how they affect where/when they should be used, and I feel it's more useful then your average "vocab"-like flashcard.
My layman's take is that flashcards are based on the idea of forcing retrieval through a trigger. It seems to me that atomicity is an inherent assumption, as well as independence, and that each flashcard maps to a finite set of deterministic answers. Feelings or a sense of things aren't as easily encoded. Tabular/graph relationships aren't as easily encoded either, and likewise sequences of decision trees aren't easily encoded. One can presumably design a chained sequence of cards complete with decision trees, but at this point flashcards end up being an unwieldy paradigm.
Fortunately one doesn't need limit oneself to flashcards. There are other methods like the method of loci etc. that work great for say, sequenced knowledge, like speeches or lyrics to a song, areas in which flashcards aren't the most natural fit.
To me however, memory is but one tool out of many for understanding something. I personally tend not to focus on memory itself too much. For the kind of stuff I'm interested in, memory is an outcome actually doing stuff, getting thing wrong, and then internalizing. In language learning, the memory that comes from embarrassment from making faux pas is both more quickly assimilated and retained longer than via SRS. I still remember mistakes made years ago even though they only happened once or twice.
I use Typora for typed notes and Goodnotes/Notability for handwritten. Sometimes I even take screenshots of handwritten and attach them in Typora.
One can ask why multiple apps?
I really like Typora for its simplicity. Found Notabilty and Goodnotes macOS app really terrible :( Would love to hear thoughts of other folks.
One useful hybrid approach is to view typed note taking as rapid capture of a rough draft, which if disciplined should lead to selective re-drafting of sections that require more thorough commitment to memory.
So I now use a notebook and flashcards for bits I want to remember and org mode for anything searchable.
Edit: of course I write too sloppy for this to always work...
From the linked paper:
> Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.
The mechanism here is probably that people are able to type faster, so typing lets them write down every word, whereas handwriting forces them to choose what to write down. The superior way of note taking by this logic is clearly typing on your phone.
But this has irrelevant for note taking as people on HN are likely to understand it: Writing down your ideas.
In a sense, they take notes all day long so they are an interesting subject. On the other hand they are taking notes related to an external source, and not of stuff they are thinking by themselves or content anchored in a process other than passing a test.
I took notes by hand at school and take only digital notes now that I am working. While I respect the research done, I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing.
Intuitively, I can’t imagine that content that comes from my own brain that I am formatting into notes has a completely different retention rate depending on wether I type it or write it. Especially as I have no time pressure to think about what I’ll write.
Basically, would I remember this comment better if I wrote it on a post’it ? Id really like a study on this, and not students at school.
Like you said, I think a better takeaway from this study is that you don’t remember what you don’t think about or engage with. I’m perfectly capable of not thinking about what I write and subsequently forgetting it just as much as this study claims only happens whe you type stuff out.
It's not just a function of the average conceptual speed of the lecture, either, it's also a function of how bursty it is, and both are relative to what you already know and modulated by the quality of the presentation.
Taped lectures are a game changer because you can 2x over the slow parts and dwell on the bursts.
And that's been my experience as a math student. Professors of advanced math courses tend to write very quickly for brief bursts and then pause to explain what's going on. The definition or proof they describe can often be subtle enough that you don't have much of a chance to understand it unless you've had the opportunity to preview the lecture notes before class.
Tragically, not every professor provides lecture notes in advance, and some don't provide lecture notes at all. Then if you're taking notes by hand you're taking a big risk that you might pause to reflect and miss noting a crucial step in the proof, leaving yourself baffled by what you wrote later on.
If you look at the paper sheet, it is because you have to check you are still on the guideline.
However I believe that at uni, I would write a whole line without looking if I needed to (that's after about a decade of fast hand writing almost 8 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, though). That those lines had a tendency to go up or down was not a problem, because making a clean copy of those notes was part of my learning strategy.
Of course it's only anecdotal evidence, but when I was studying at university I could register pretty much everything by hand (thanks to using a fountain pen. Those who wish to write fast for any reason should consider a fountain pen - with a medium or broad, relatively stiff nib) and still I find manual note taking much more effective than typing.
You still are doing lots of mental computations when you write by hand, even if you don't need to summarize.
When writing in cursive, the entire word affects how you write each letter, while in block letter writing each letter is independent. Keyboard typing is like block letter writing in that respect, and I suspect that might also be playing a role.
It is quite good from a writing perspective. I very much loved the tactile experience of a good fountain pen and nib on robust heavy paper. Remarkable is not that, of course, but a worthy experience in its own right. I am using it at this moment for some creative technical design work.
It is less good from a reviewing and rereading perspective. Even at the finest line width I have to work a little harder to read back through my poor script- something I much less frequently found problematic on paper. And page turning and locating earlier notes in a 20-50 page document (an amount I easily produce weekly, sometimes daily) is much less ergonomic than with paper.
The recognition does not work with my writing, but I can see that improving and that feature becoming killer in the context of more structured document authoring on the Remarkable, like filling out a templated form with gestures or short letter/word notes. They are not far from that capability.
And on the whole I have gotten to a place where the ritual is satisfying and useful. Not perfect, but paper and pen, however enjoyable, were not perfect either.
I have also recently become aware of a product called Papyr, which has two features of interest- a larger writing surface, and live synchronization with other Papyr devices and with software on iPad or desktop. It may be able to be a useful shared whiteboard.
That's why I went with an iPad over Remarkable for note taking. I LOVE my kindle's e-ink display, but from what I saw Remarkable just doesn't let you zoom and pan through your notes and cross-reference with the same fluidity as a tablet, and I decided that was more important.
Hopefully they figure out how to get e-ink FPS up because I would love to have the best of both worlds.
Youtube reviews are probably the best way to get a feel for the current competitive landscape (e.g. GoodNotes vs Notability, MarginNote vs LiquidText).
GoodNotes made a lot of right choices, and LiquidText is especially under-appreciated:
How well does the iPad handle hand recognition when using a pen? Does it accidentally scroll down PDFs or lag when you are switching from pen to fingers to zoom or pan?
It does feel quicker and more accurate too though I wouldn’t say that’s a dealbreaker for the first gen (I also upgraded to a 12.9” iPad which I think makes a bigger difference for note taking etc, maybe because you end up writing a bit bigger than on paper so the extra space is useful?)
Why not alter your handwriting to work better with the software? My first handwriting recognition experience was on a Palm Pilot using Graffiti. I got to be pretty fast with that and I think being forced to create better letter forms has benefited me greatly since then.
I too have a Remarkable V2 on the way but for now I'm using GoodNotes on an iPad and I also scan pages of my notes and stick them in Evernote. Both GoodNotes and Evernote give me almost perfect OCR.
BEST THING EVER. I got to write with the pen (Non-touch screen) and the mic recorded the audio for my graduate classes. It would recognize my writing and the audio fairly decently and I was living the dream.
I could never get anyone else to use OneNote with a mic, and I was a Systems Librarian at a College and taught all incoming freshmen. They had laptops and OneNote and no one used it.
I take my notes with the computer or tablet. But, I think with a paper and a pencil in my hand.
For design sessions my team uses simplified UML diagrams to understand the flow of data. Just talking and taking notes feels incomplete and, literally, difficult to visualize.
So, I agree with the post that hand writing is important, and it allows for graphics and other enhancements.
I think note taking is seriously overrated. Sure some disciplines have things you need to know by heart, and having your own notes can help with that. But I rather use my brain power and attention to interpret and integrate what I hear during a lecture. Then use the literature if I need to refresh anything. For some people I feel that learning have been exchanged with note taking.
It's n=1, but I didn't see any studies cited in the article either, just expert opinion and suggestions like the unweildly "Cornell method", which I have tried to use without success and never seen anyone else use.
It probably comes down to a lot of cognitive variation among people. In my experience, reviewing notes that I took during lecture has about zero productivity. They don't mean anything afterward, they just reflect a few bits and pieces that made it through eyes/ears, brain, and hand. I'd be better off with a stenographer's transcript or, you know, a book chapter I had read before hand.
What I have started doing recently for my own journaling is to voice record instead of writing. This puts the emphasis on the thought organization instead of the spatio-tactile-visuals of forming symbols. I record a few lines and then pause to think.
The recall of it is slow, but it's mostly info I am studying in the moment, and its verbalization makes me focus on getting it correct the first time instead of write and edit, write and edit.
Felt like anytime there were hard demands to have good notes, I spent most of my effort on taking notes rather than actually doing anything that benefitted me like comprehending what was being taught. Situation improved in college when I was finally able to record and use a laptop but I still found maths to require a friend to utilize as a notetaker for lecture.
It usually takes two days to fill up a notebook page. I'll review that page when it's full and make sure everything is either done, filed away, or on my calendar. Then toss the page in the recycling bin.
If detailed notes are valuable enough to keep long term, take minimal notes but record it. Later read any related written materials, then document it after you've understood it.
But the thing that I missed most was the feel of pencil on paper. A stylus sliding around glass felt... bad and I was always distracted by it.
Has anyone tried Paperlike? I'm interested in the "feel" and how it affects display quality.
I have an iPad Pro but the pen on the glass just doesn't work for me. Yes, I've tried with screen protectors but the feel is still not as good, the screen experience is seriously degraded, and they chew your expensive pen away.
The Remarkable seems very limited and expensive for what it is.
That said, I've had the same experience, the iPad is lovely for sketching and calligraphy, but trying to write on it at a decent clip is an exercise in frustration.
It’s possible this aspect can atrophy if physical writing is not practiced for long enough. And it’s probable relearning it will ‘reactivate’ so to speak those pathways.
As a bonus handwriting on paper is an excellent archival medium, if stored properly.
Hard real-time access and retrieval with guaranteed future and backwards compatibility. No power or maintenance requirements. Guaranteed versioning is possible, immutability, and no licensing or region issues. Also operable in extreme cold.
Really a great solution if you need any of those features.
Speaking of which, it makes me wonder if the current aversion to taking handwritten notes people seem to have biases academic achievement towards some subjects where notes are generally not very useful (e.g. programming) and away from fundamental, formula- and graph-heavy stuff, e.g. physics and math, which you can hardly properly learn without notes at all.
The sword is being able to remember, the scabbard to forget. It is the latter, the scabbard, to be able to forget, that is the more important. It is our filter for the reality we endure, and gives us both wisdom and comfort.
Wisdom, because it frees us from that which was unimportant; and comfort, because it unburdens us from those things which cause us pain.
This was me until I discovered fountain pens and good paper. I used to write on cheap ballpoints and my hands would be throbbing after about 6 pages of notes (I was taking a class with lots of readings).
Fountain pens are a rabbit hole of their own, but if you have good paper and a pen with smooth flowing ink (doesn't have to be fountain, gel pens work great too) and a nib size that matches the size of your handwriting (mine is small so I prefer Fine nibs), writing becomes pleasurable.
Also I'm big on scribbling marginalia, but cheap hotel ballpoints, small margins and my own bad handwriting have always made it hard to make annotations (I often write things like "This is STUPID" but with cheap ballpoints I run out of room and have to squeeze words to the point of illegibility which leads to me giving up). I recently discovered Pilot Hi-Tec-C 0.3mm pens from Japan, and they've been a dream for scribbling more substantial thoughts in book margins.
P.s. arguing with the authors of nonfiction books in the margins is fun. I recommend it.
When I was younger and writing regularly, I could scribble fast and it would still be relatively neat.
Now I type all day, the few occasions when I do write just end up in a mistake-ridden scrawl.
I find I need to relax my finger grip and slow down, almost like I'm back in junior school.
As to improving handwriting, in particularly dull periods I'd pull out a pen and do alphabet practice. Literally just pages of writing out the alphabet over and over. Then words, practicing cursive specifically but it doesn't have to be. This got my short-form or unrushed handwriting quality to a point where it wasn't embarrassing and I liked writing letters to my girlfriend. Learn to have a looser grip on the pen or pencil (I had an iron grip which I picked up somewhere along the way which led to cramping and poorer handwriting).
I also always had a personal hangup about highlighting or writing notes on books ("sacrilege!" :) ), it always felt like I would ruin the book for a future reader. So during a lecture, it's nice to have a PDF copy of the text book imported into the notes software, then I'll sometimes cut and paste diagrams from the book into my notes, or just write notes on the book itself, depending on the situation. It's also pretty nice to be able to take a pic of the board if a prof is going too fast for me, put it directly into the note, then just rewrite it when I get a chance later.
Personally I use notability, which I think is nice, but sometimes gives me problems with syncing and access to my notes when icloud has some bug. So I switch on the setting for backup the entire note to google drive (you can use any cloud storage), just so I can always get access to my notes. It's "only" happened two or three times in three years, but... I think it is an icloud issue, not a notability issue, but I feel like they should be able to architect it so that the local notes are still available in the event of an icloud issue, whereas what actually happens is the local notes disappear - hence the need for the separate cloud backup of the note files!
I am often complemented on my note taking. My view is that longhand is superfluous. Try to write more briefly and to write in all caps. Use more features like bullets, outlines and spaces and a different color pen for drawings, comments, underlines, outlines, lines indicating relationships, etc. This dates back to when I was perhaps 8 I had a teacher who forced us to use a ruler to create double-underlines for all headings in a separate color. This was, in hindsight, an awesome formative influence.
About brevity, think about it like this: if a second language speaker or child can understand the gist of it, you're doing well.
I don't actually take notes very often. A few times per month at most by hand, and probably a few times per week digitally. Basically I only take notes when in creative mode (interrogating own brain, reading stimulating material, brainstorming with others) or making research notes (often market research or technology related).
I do like sketching ideas on paper, can't do it as fast on a computer. I tried the Note 9 with its stylus, it's rather good, but the screen is too small.
It might actually be a game changer for my notes/sketches!
Thank you!
Not unrelated: Readline/emacs shortcuts work almost everywhere, which is to say that Ctl-F is forward in this very text buffer.
Not that I use it, but I do use Ctl-A and Ctl-E a fair amount.
And thank you all for sharing such insightful comments.
WFH left me doing less note taking, though. As I just audio record the important meetings.
I started obsessively looking at them earlier this week, and my conclusion is that they're not ready for prime time yet. The Remarkable software team is facing heavy criticism. The Supernote team is lauded for their responsiveness, but they don't have warehouses in Europe. Both companies accept preorders, not actual orders.
The ideas and hardware are there, but the products still need a lot of refinement.
I do wish pencil could be attached to the ipad easily without having to buy a special case though as they always tend to separate in my household and having to go hunt the stylus down makes it a lot less useful.
For me, optimal is to use something like OneNote, which you can use with a pen (iPad/Surface), and it recognizes what you handwrite
There is a paradox here though, and I'm experiencing it myself as I review 10yrs of note books filled during the course of my PhD. I was hoping to find lots of forgotten treasures but I'm discovering more and more that anything I wrote down was also retained (more or less), of course anything not written down was lost to time. It's as if I may as well have been writing onto a ceramic tile with a drinking straw.