Writing notes by hand might not be better than typing (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Writing notes by hand might not be better than typing (2019)

blog.library.tc.columbia.edu

51 pointsbrandontran61 comments

There’s a culture of life hacking and microoptimizing that promotes following conclusions made on pvalues and averages as a key to the promised land (re: “trust science” as a replacement for religious style identity and morality even).

In the reverse direction, non academic population’s desire for popular science seems to lead with a carrot and incentivize studies like this (I think about this like trying to objectify relative efficiency multipliers of -personal- study habits?).

It’s the same thing as always: who has the time to think critically about every aspect of life. I think these things are just assurances to reduce that anxiety of uncertainty.

Whether pen vs keyboard is the “best” option according to the given study, there will be folks who are naturally on the “losing” side of the distribution whose habits are not supported by the conclusion. I think it can cause some cognitive dissonance when these folks are encouraged to force themselves to do what science said was best; even when is not what is best for them.

The bell curve means, by definition, that some non zero amount of people will not cluster around the mean.

This is where the notion of personalized learning really comes into place. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalized_learning)

IMO the culture will go to the keyboard because the web is the medium in which your notes obtain a social dimension. Otherwise they are isolated paper notes meant to be discarded after the class is done (unless you are the kind of person who boxes your notes).

> I think about this like trying to objectify relative efficiency multipliers of -personal- study habits?

makes me wonder what happens if you cut the data by:

> frequently picks their nose

do you think the bonus zen of mindless nose picking is offset enough by the drag of increased chance of nose infection reducing total study time?

There are two options to improve our model:

We can include nose picking rate as an independent variable, or we can recommend that everyone pick the same amount of nose.

Just think of the headlines we will write!

NOSE KNOWS BEST!

Reads like another example of the replication crisis. Two studies testing the same thing, originally handwritten notes were better for conceptual questions and this time they’re better for factual. The handwritten students on one test were outperformed by the no notes group.

Either way, both groups have to remember the information at test time, and memory is fallible. Notes may or may not help someone remember the information, and it may be different from person to person or even situation to situation.

Yeah, I am always curious how some people act like a study of this sort means you should change your behavior. Studies find averages and correlations (and sometimes causation), but that doesn't mean much for an individual trying to make a decision.

It might be true, for example, that the average person does better with hand written notes than typed notes. That doesn't mean that EVERY person does better with hand written notes, and you have more information about yourself than just being 'an average person'. If you think you are better at taking notes on a computer, your information is much more applicable to your own situation than a general study showing that most people aren't that way.

I’ve always thought these studies were stupid and lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing.

Just on face value, the quality and type of instruction varies so wildly that this entire conversation is moot. Adults can make their own decisions about knowledge processing.

I'm certain a person's preference probably creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> I’ve always thought these studies were stupid

Why? I can't see any reason why studies that try to determine which method of note-taking leads to the most knowledge comprehension is "stupid" - in fact, this is one of the most interesting kinds of studies to me, and it's objectively useful given the massive shift towards knowledge-work in the past few decades.

> lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing.

And what does this have to do with the quality of the studies themselves? Ad-hominem.

> Adults can make their own decisions about knowledge processing.

This is an emotionally-manipulative and irrelevant statement. "Irrelevant" because the given studies made no prescriptive claims about which method to use - they just tried to measure which methods were the most effective.

Well, for starters you have to figure out how you measure "comprehension".

Seeming as different brains make different space-time trade-offs when representing/retaining knowledge.

...which is an entirely valid criticism of existing studies - unlike GP's post.

You conveniently skipped the crux of my argument: instruction styles vary so widely that focusing on note-taking tools in a lecture environment is pointless. It’s like asking “which utensil is the best” without establishing the food you’re eating.

The premise is ridiculous and clearly driven by a desire to make high-minded statements about analog versus digital methods. I’ve read several of these studies for grad school, and you don’t have to get much further than the abstracts to see how badly academics want to prove this point.

Throughout my academic career I’ve seen professors point to these awful studies to justify their class policies. My comment was clearly not just discussing these studies in a vacuum, so I’m not sure why you’re treating it like a peer review.

I remember working at a not-to-be-named tech company with a weekly "marching orders" meeting led by an old-school VP who insisted on no-laptops. She'd actually stop the meeting if she saw a laptop open. The meeting was very information-dense. So the notetakers (yes, plural), would spend the whole time frantically scribbling down every word on paper without missing anything. Following this, we all had to then dedicate some time to quickly transcribe these notes digitally into an E-mail anyway which got sent out before the afternoon. It seemed like such a pointless inefficiency, but I suppose nobody wanted to be the one to question whether we could do better.

>lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing

I spent five years as a university professor, and I did not care at all whether my students were taking notes on their laptops, or trying to multi-task by studying for something else (or even checking their Facebook, or whatever). I know I did the same (studying, not Facebooking; I'm too old for that) when I was a student, and I'd rather have had them in class, no matter where their cost-benefit analysis directed their moment-by-moment attention.

If it was a discussion-oriented class, then we arranged chairs in a circle; I sat (very non-hierarchically, lol) in the same circle. No problem there.

If it was a more "conventional" classroom setup, then I always asked the laptop-users to sit in the back. This was because I'd observed (our department had us sit in, once per term, on a colleague's class, which was excellent) that students frequently viewed distracting material in class. I don't know which was worse: the dude looking through photos of his girlfriend not-quite-nude, but definitely NSFW; or the girl reviewing for an A&P test, and flipping through really gory human dissection photos. No one needs to see those.

I always explained the reason to my students, with those exact examples, and no one ever had a problem -- though I remember sometimes seeing a few red faces on the first day as the laptop-users switched seats.

You're totally right, though, about adults making their own decisions about knowledge processing. I always tried to respect students' autonomy to the greatest extent possible. I saw my laptop rule as an important part of that ethos.

These are completely fair compromises and I wish this attitude was more widespread. The discussion example in particular is why I bring up variability in teaching methods. In that setting, jotting down some occasional ideas is all you might need. Compare that to one of my former professors who quizzed us on his personal anecdotes from lecture and we have a complete different set of needs.

These studies annoy me because they insist that lectures are identical and “comprehension” is always poorly defined as some arbitrary exam of how many obscure details were memorized from a Powerpoint. At the end of the day, whether I’m transcribing on a laptop or visually representing ideas with watercolors is less important than how effectively a teacher happens to target my learning style. At some point we need to stop repackaging the Prussian model and insisting on the One True Way™ for students to learn.

To the kind of people here - not sure that is true.

I used paper because I found myself obsessing about layout & formatting & open format & organization & backups etc. i.e. optimizing everything except learning.

I also found a lot of discipline in "we're gonna keep hitting this topic until you're capable of condensing this down to a one pager". Once it's on a page learn it off by heart and then exam. Often found myself with 3 pages on 1st attempt and it then ending up being a valuable exercise in "ok what here really matters".

Similarly had to force myself to take away all the million colours and pens. Mechanical pencil, ruler, unlined paper. The end.

I prefer paper to study on. But when it comes to making notes on the computer I just use notepad. If I need a diagram, paint.

When the whole point is to engage your brain, get your imagination going to envision the topic at hand ; plain content is all that matters, let your imagination do the work.

I think it is also why "movies vs books" have a lot of "the book was better" proponents.

What convinced me to switch to hand-writing was recognizing how much time I spent correcting typos when typing notes - I'd go back and fix a typo and realize I had missed whatever the next thing was. When I switched back to hand-writing notes, I captured a lot more of what was being said.

I've actually thought about this a lot (I'm building a note-taking platform), and one feature I still want to integrate is something to address this. My current best idea is to just hide stuff you've already written from you until you are finished. I've already seen this used elsewhere, but most recently experienced it with The Most Dangerous Writing App[1], which I actually used to write significant parts of my thesis.

[1] https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app

Interesting. I can relate to the urge of correcting typos as they are produced. This only happens to me when I see the text though.

I have come to look away from the text input or simply close my eyes to fight that urge. Right now, as I write these words, my eyes are closed. I peek at the text every now and then to correct typos, formatting and grammar; and am often surprised by how little typos I've made.

It also helps me focus on what I'm writing instead of constantly parsing the text I have just typed.

On note-taking: I can anecdotally confirm that taking notes like this definitely makes me feel like I'm learning a lot more and understand what I'm writing down.

> how few typos (lol)

I have had the same experience, though. Looking away from the screen is a good technique. I tend to fold my laptop screen down until I can't quite see it.

I find, regardless of the medium in which I'm taking notes, that summarizing the content in my own words is far more valuable than trying to take down exactly what someone is saying. Do you do the same?

I suppose that if I'd learned shorthand, or could type way faster than I do, that creating a transcript might be worthwhile. I don't know, though; it seems like processing it for a summary forces me to engage with the material more than just rote typing does, and I then retain the information more easily.

> > how few typos (lol)

Big facepalm.

On the matter of summaries: I do something similar.

I also feel that writing things down in your own words goes a long way. When I'm writing things down in my own words I also like to pretend that I'm explaining it to someone who has no knowledge of the topic.

For me at least, this makes every note I take an attempt at an explanation and I often completely rewrite a note on a topic without looking at a previous one. I can then compare them to see how I've progressed as well as replacing the old one if the new one is more concise. I guess this is quite similar to your style.

This usually only takes 2-3 iterations before I'm comfortable with a topic, but if it's something important I need to learn for the long term, I do the re-writing of a note in spaced-repitition-like intervals.

I actually have lost my handwriting precision from years of typing on keyboards and electronic devices. So my writing, especially when fast has become extremely sloppy. I wonder if retraining that would have any other benefits beside helping with cursive. I'm thinking of micromotor and nervous system benefits...

For math or subjects with visual diagrams writing notes by hand definitely beats typing it out.

There are math input methods that are on par with handwriting, e.g. texmacs or mathcad

I highly doubt writing texmacs or other complex coding for diagrams leads to the same memory retention as plotting by hand.

Back in the days of transition from writing with bird feathers to writing with steel tips that one didn't have to sharpen, such claims were made as well.

And perhaps they were right as well. Seems to me the general idea is to use a mildly inefficient tool to bottleneck your notetaking speed with the goal of increasing the total amount of time spent with the material; a plausible enough idea I think.

Isn't the context here in-class notes? The time spent is a constant, and the goal is to maintain the right kinds/ratios of focus.

What? No. Also notes when studying.

Both studies were about taking notes during a lecture.

The way you take notes during self-directed studying is important, and should be tested, but wasn't.

Was there a different study somewhere that wasn't focused on lectures?

I agree that while it might be fun / efficient / impressive to learn the various methods of quickly specifying mathematical diagrams using symbolic entry, it distracts from the underlying message of the lecture.

Experiential salience is important for learning. It would be like copy and pasting code without typing it out yourself re a tutorial.

Not as fast or easy as directly writing. And you then don't have to deal with an unusual format.

For me, a key point is if the teacher is using a blackboard with prepared notes or not.

Using a blackboard affords more time to actually taking notes. I could follow the derivations as they happened, and would frequently catch mistakes like a missing sign.

In addition, at least for me the act of writing them down engages different areas of my brain. I think more about what I'm writing when taking notes by hand, while typing LaTeX or similar on the fly causes me to think more about how.

For me, writing notes by hand from a teacher using a blackboard with prepared notes lead to orders of magnitude better recollection and understanding.

If all the teacher had was PowerPoint slides, I typically barely recalled anything.

> If all the teacher had was PowerPoint slides, I typically barely recalled anything.

Probably because you were in a coma.

Typically it was because PowerPoint slides makes it easy to cram a lot of information in a small space. It also makes it easy to make something which is not note-writing friendly.

Of course I did recall some things, but after a few semesters I found PowerPoint-oriented classes to be barely worth attending. This was in stark contrast to the blackboard-oriented classes, which I found immensely valuable.

I'd say, it depends? It definitely takes less time to screenshot something from the notes and import it in LaTeX, or even plot it with python and matplotlib or seaborn.

"Better" is a very broad word.

I have found pen and paper to be a highly productive alternative to typing for organizing my life, despite the fact that I'm much faster at typing and my handwriting is awful:

- pen and paper require no batteries

- pen and paper are more portable than any electronic device with comparable input efficiency

- pieces of paper can be placed in spatial locations as contextual reminders

- no backlight = no eyestrain

- totally seamless transition from inputting text to diagrams to tables to "realistic" sketches; idea space can be navigated freely

- ability to easily spatially organize information on a page

- narrow context aids focus (while a laptop distracts by the sheer possibility of opening a terminal and trying something, or looking something up)

I prefer hand writing notes for most meetings, mostly because I've been gifted fountain pens and nice paper and feel the need to use them. I also found after not writing notes by hand for the first half of the pandemic my handwriting turned even more awful than it typically is. For both notes and diagrams I scan them into Evernote afterward.

Me too! I've also gotten into inks.

I'm surprised people even create this dichotomy still given how good writing recognition is. I'd say in a decade or two writing recognition will be effectively a "solved" problem the same way spellcheck is.

touch typing should be faster than handwriting, no?

It really depends on the subject matter and symbol set - in stats classes I took notes in a LaTeX dialect which sorta worked but took a lot more mental effort than handwriting, but I was also actively trying to train myself into using TeX style expression so it was worth it - for just taking down notes hand-writing can definitely be faster and more legible for anything with lots of weird symbols.

Let me introduce you shorthand, especially alphabetic shorthand. (The latter is much easier to learn)

You can get relatively easily into the 100WPM range - above most good typists. And if you're willing to invest in symbolic instead of alphabetic shorthand, you can get to ~200WPM, well outside of what a typical touch typist can do.

I'd be interested to see how well shorthand helps with the concerns raised in the OP (retention, etc) though.

I personally type at 120 WPM and so I think would struggle to do much better with handwriting in a way that would be helpful for long-term use of my notes, as shorthand does not seem very useful in this regard.

I'm curious - why do you think shorthand isn't useful for long-term use? It stays perfectly readable. It's not "I made up this abbreviation, and now I don't know what it means". :)

I guess for me in particular it's because a lot of my notes I like to share with others or re-arrange in a way that I don't think would be conducive to short-hand.

> And if you're willing to invest in symbolic instead of alphabetic shorthand, you can get to ~200WPM, well outside of what a typical touch typist can do.

The fair comparison to that is probably stenotyping at 300WPM.

Well, yes and no. OP was comparing touch typing and hand writing. Which I think are the two major modes of note taking available - few of us lug around extra hardware to do stenotyping.

But yes, it's faster. (So is just recording everything on video, if we just care about speed :)

If you can carry around a laptop, you can carry around an extra mini keyboard or learn how to do chording on a normal keyboard.

I'm all over the place on this one, flipping between wanting to type everything and wanting to write everything.

What I like about writing is the ability to jump around on a page. I don't have to conform to a particular layout. Adding columns, tables, drawings, or whatever, happens at the speed of thought.

Typing or using any sort of digital notetaking invariably leads to some sort of slow down in just getting it down. Or on waiting on the pen to catch up to what I'm doing.

Ultimately, what I wind up doing is to start on paper, get the big bulky ideas out of the way, then refine that in some sort of digital format.

Brainstorming on paper gives you more freedom to do whatever you want. Editing it out works better in an editor. I do write down ideas on paper but when I tried to write more on paper I am unable to keep up, my hand gets tired, the writing becomes less and less legible. This is the result of lack of practice I guess..

I can't remember my notes no matter how I write them. But I can play Boggle about twice as fast when typing as when writing by hand. My sister has fast cursive, while I have an advantage typing, so of course I prefer typing.

Pictures, conversations, and experience trying things myself are how I think I remember things most easily after a lecture.

It all boils down to personal preference, do what works for you.

I personally have found typing to be the best, nothing beats plain text files that you can later search on.

The only exception is when you want to draw diagrams or similar stuff, I mean you can sort of draw a diagram with ASCII but is far from practical.

TL;DR:

"This study does not offer a clear answer to whether handwritten notes or typed notes lead to better performance"

What's wrong with test performance? The fact you have to recall information is a thing in the real world.

In the real world I have access to Google, books, tools, other humans.

In the real world I have access to more information than I do in any test.

Tests are artificial constraints.

IMO both can be true

I'm willing to bet for the 20-40 wpm boomer, writing notes by hand is significantly slower (and therefore worse) than typing, because the act of typing is so challenging for them that they can't focus on the actual subject matter.

Meanwhile, for actually competent typists, it's nbd and the fact that they can actually type faster than they can write helps them to focus on the subject matter.

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