The importance of handwriting is now better understood
economist.com
economist.com
I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take notes by hand for more profound impact.
If you look after a young person or are willing to go relearn it yourself I highly recommend the discipline and style that Marion Richardson demands. While learning it at first it looks childish, but it provides a foundation that you will immediately adapt with your own flavour. It got dropped in UK schools in the 1980s for being too old fashioned, for which I read 'difficult'.
Sadly I cannot recommend any modern books or worksheets (through my own contemporary ignorance) but her original books from 1935 still stand up [1]
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo13...
[1] https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1326657/writing-and-writ...
I think you want the word "soothe" which means to calm. "Sooth" means "truth" as in "sooth-sayer."
The sense of "quiet, comfort, restore to tranquility," in reference to a person or animal, is by 1690s, via the notion of "to assuage one by asserting that what he says is true,"
It linked to a scan of the Marion Richardson “Teacher's Book” hosted on the internet archive [2].
The actual booklets are strangely absent from the internet (if indeed these were used into the 1980s). I suppose things that aren't old enough to be exempt from mickey-mouse copyright extension are a grey area?
This "you might be a bot" is going to be the next Red Scare or witch hunt (that the esteemed AI revolutionaries will deny any responsibility for). Just wait till the real bots learn to start saying that! [spiderman pointing gif]
I guess it doesn't matter now, since it's been flagged… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I need the fastest & most legible writing system. Legible. Fast. Can we design a hand writing system that hits 30 wpm? 40wpm? Without resorting to shorthand. I'd rather redesign the alphabet from the ground up instead of bothering with shorthand.
I actually find most cursive is hard to read, and yet I grew up with some exposure to cursive. I imagine many people younger than me would have less exposure to cursive altogether. Cursive is kind of dying off, except in terms of writing speed.
About 5 years ago I "installed a font" on myself - I sat down with a sheet of letter forms and taught myself a variant of architectural lettering, which has a nice balance of legibility and aesthetics, and less rigid than engineering lettering.
I'm still working on some of my cursive forms, but I definitely enjoy writing more (and the rhythm!! It's like music or dance, and almost meditative) now that I've started using it again as an adult.
I agree the act of writing things out helps. But I strongly disagree this is specific to handwriting. Typing things out has the same effect.
"New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos."
"After six learning sessions, everyone in the video watching and type-writing group had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify each of its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group—who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions—gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions."
Replace handwriting with any other activity. It is probably the same. Doing something helps learning faster than just watching.
This comports with my personal language learning experience, for what that's worth. I couldn't say whether it translates to other subjects.
Full article is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641140/
It is not surprising that peoples learn to recognise those shape faster when they actually had to learn to draw them instead of just pointing (typing) to use them.
But I don't think it makes any kind of real difference to achieving proficiency level for reading/thinking/writing the language. Recognising the glyphs is a small part of learning a language, you learn grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction, idioms, mostly by repeated exposure and chances are the vast majority of it is from reading ; it wouldn't be very efficient to learn by hand writing everything...
When the learning tools are detached from the subject at hand - as is the case in most college classes where basic literacy is a given - it's hard to see how one particular tool could possibly be better than others.
This system allows you to write cursive with exceptional flow and - if you wish - flair, rather than simply copying complicated shapes and then having that body memory inevitably degrade over the years.
I never got any good at it, but after 28 years my ability hasn’t degraded either.
I thought I lost my touch, but all my remaining writings from 28 years ago show exactly the same level of suck xD. So at least the part about body memory seem to be completely correct.
That said, I think it reads easier than fully cursive, because it is less dense.
The act of writing imposes structure and optimisation on the language to convey (transfer) an idea.
Structure, because of grammar and notation. Optimisation, because we don't wish to exhaust ourselves in writing or the readers in reading.
But knowledge of grammar is essential.
I'll try adding this to my routine. Curious if I can track an increase in my mood and general happiness if I'm writing more.
It's sad that this incredible ability of our brain to learn concepts from the small movement of our hands, probably sculpted by our evolution, is going to get lost in future generations. This is because companies are making deals with schools to provide them software and devices. In a better world the school system would be one of the top 2 priority of every country, and receive adeguate public investments to don't have to adapt their education systems at companies product, to satisfy the greediness of entrepreneurs and investors.
Don't abandon pen and paper, don't regress human brain capacity.
That is to say, it’s all just personal preference. Explore and exploit what works for you.
For me, the point of taking notes has never been the final product. I went through college taking at least a page of notes per lecture, but never once did I actually go back and reference them. The notes were valuable for getting the material into my brain, not for use later.
This gave me two advantages; (1) I could focus on the lecture itself and not how to best summarize the lecture, and (2) I could review the notes later as a higher quality product than what I would have invented.
This strategy didn't work for things like math classes which were hard to take computer notes on.
Even when I took notes via laptop in class it was never a direct transcription.
I can't really begin to imagine what selective pressure could realistically have acted on this, certainly given the tiny period of time over which any substantial percentage of the population would have been using their hands to store information in any way.
If there's any correlation between use of computers and any loss of ability to memorise concepts (which I'm not convinced we actually have proof of) it could just as easily be explained by our tendency to "offload", knowing that any gaps in our memory/understanding can readily be filled by technology as needed.
I do worry about a possible future where we literally stop bothering learning how to handwrite at all, but mainly because there's still sufficient chance you might need such a skill at some crucial moment when computers can't be used. But it's surely sufficient just to know how to block print capital letters.
Don’t need a selective pressure for a cognitive process to work in a particular way. You just need a selective pressure for the cognitive skill and for the way that skill works to at least not have a pressure against it, biology being full of engineering compromises.
Learning well with handwriting, IMO, has little to do with hands specifically, but memory and understanding in general, where the spatially situated product of the action (on a specific piece of paper used and then kept in a specific place) taken in a properly free form manner with much more analogue detail (paper is a blank canvas and handwriting will have nuance throughout a piece of writing) that most likely also slows you down and forces a huge number of little decisions all facilitate the task of memorisation and recall.
That spatially attendant information assists memory seems to me very plausibly consistent with primate evolution where most if not all tasks benefiting from memory would have had such information as either a fundamental component or readily associated.
For similar reasons, I think there’s something to be said for sorting important information in physical books on shelves, where the location of information in the physical space can aid recall.
I think it’s easy to forget just how weirdly disconnected and abstract the computer interface is from everything else we use in the world.
Ideally, computers ought to be driving at optimising for humans rather than merely what works well for the tech. I think that’s been left behind too much.
(I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to perform in the real world, in some ways it's surprising we're able to become so competent at it, though obviously our ability to make finely tuned manipulations with our fingers is a huge part of our evolutionary success).
Though I'd also wonder if it's a tad more than a hypothesis given what we already know about memory both scientifically and, perhaps, from practices people have developed over time to aid memory. I don't know all that nearly well enough to put together the case, but the "memory palace" technique, which is ancient and apparently "tried and true" seems like a striking demonstration of the the basic spatial idea. If there's truth to that, I'd say my suggestion could be reframed as a strategy for using handwriting to aid memory rather than a mere hypothesis.
Regarding the "slowing down" aspect, as others have mentioned too, I'd argue again that this could be couched directly in well established ideas and understandings ... chiefly, I'd imagine, the processes of repetition, practice and synthesis that are essentially common knowledge. The slowed down process of deciding what you're going to write and how probably forces you into a cognitive loop that goes beyond the mere recording of information toward repetition and synthesis. My experience with typing is that the urge to simply record verbatim is more natural to the medium.
The reason is that handwriting is slower, so it forces you to summarize and make decisions in your note taking. Selecting what's important. On the other hand typing is faster, so you can type everything the teacher says without understanding.
What I could believe is that our brains might be better at remembering the sorts of movements our hands make while handwriting (essentially using your wrist and elbow) vs those made while typing (fingers only), perhaps because the former are closer to the act of manipulating the physical environment in ways that might needed for survival (gathering food etc.) and because you're physically tracing out a desired path in 2d space, though it seems tenuous at best.
That being said, I wouldn't trade typing on a computer for writing on paper, given the sheer speed I can achieve with one. But if we're limiting ourselves to trying to better increase retention and understanding, then I think pen-on-paper is the most valuable thing one can do.
Each iteration of formatting hopefully progresses the display of the information towards its ideal. You know when it's worked (and when something isn't working out and you need to quit and try something else).
To me the benefit of writing is that it makes me deliberately make a decision as to what I transcribe and what I leave out. If I skim read I often find my mind has drifted and I need to turn back some pages. Also, writing takes effort. If you notice you keep writing the same word/phrase, you'll give it an acronym. If you find repetition of concept, maybe you'll just draw an arrow pointing back to the paragraph the concept first came up - and your longhand is starting to turn into the next iteration already.
I remember doing python the hard way years ago, which encouraged you to type in the example python programs and run them yourself. It made a definite difference to sort of deliberately slow down and absorb during the exercise.
If I grow old & senile some day, I'll forget how to wipe my ass before the last Z80 mnemonic slips from my mind.
Socrates believed writing regressed human brain capacity, by serving as a crutch for memory and thus leading to atrophy.
Maybe he had a point, because you don’t much hear about recitations of Illiad length works from memory these days.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as all that though, because I imagine using your memory mostly as an index rather than mostly as a data store has its own set of adaptions. However, the development of that kind of comprehensive organizing memory is by no means ensured by the modern environment.
We haven't been writing that long. And the vast majority of people never did.
But the point I was making in my original reply to GGP is that it's no loss from an evolutionary perspective because the timeline is too short. I also doubt it's true from a civilization perspective, because again, the timeline is both too short and most people have never picked up a pencil.
Handwriting is likely a fetish. It's so easy to see benefits where there's actually only preference and bias.
> this incredible ability of our brain to learn concepts from the small movement of our hands, probably sculpted by our evolution
There's no way that's true, it's only been around for 5000 years and for most of that time it was excluded to a narrow circle of scribes or scholars. Literacy has only been available to the masses for the past 200 years which is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary scale.
Typing is insanely easy compared to handwriting, which is why I rarely touch a pen even though I probably should.
Handwriting makes any activity into a slow laborious project, to the point where for me it would probably be the hardest part of a lot of things I do, if I were to involve paper. I assume that creates more immersion and prevents doing things on autopilot?
I wonder, if typing was hard, like if we had two keyboards 10ft apart, and the computer required you to switch every 100 keystrokes, and the monitor was only visible from one, or if your phone only let you type while walking, how using that for notes would affect memory?
With typing, I find it easier to enter a flow state. That stream of consciousness where it feels the prose (or code) seems to write itself.
With handwriting, I must visualize what I'm about to write. Plan ahead. Think thru things. This works for lists, writing letters, and even graphic stuff like design diagrams.
I also must really pay attention when I'm taking notes during meetings and lectures. Otherwise, my mind will wander off and I'll miss the whole thing. So I often volunteer to take minutes when I want to fully participate.
PS: Out of respect for u/jncfhnb, I'll add an explicit YMMV.
We're sort of like LLMs in the way that we don't really see letters when reading anyway, we just see words or parts of words directly. I would expect writing to be the same conceptually.
If anything I'd more lean towards having to form complete solid thoughts before writing them by hand could be beneficial, while typing lets you go back and correct or reword everything, making the overall memory of it fuzzier.
Having to endlessly recombine your mental mapping with a numpad or digital pad to generate letters/sentences is much worse for humans than driving, or pen and paper.
The mental mapping for pen and paper is also one-to-one, using behaviours to make specific known shapes is way more powerful than submitting to an arbitrary remapping device.
Electronics are really no good for first order knowledge generation and gathering. The metaphysics of reality hasn't been overcome by tech revolutions, unfortunately (or not).
There might be a threshold to be good with an input method, but it feels contrived to me to assume that only the most basic ones can be mastered and become intuitive.
The pen acts like an untrained intern. It does exactly what you say and doesn't deviate from that. The computer acts as your manager. It tells you exactly what spot to hit to make a letter.
I'm not sure if this is pure crackpot armchair psychology, but my theory is that some people naturally think on multiple levels and understand things from first principles, and for them UIs are confusing because their brain tries to understand every single thing it sees.
I see "Press button, letter appears, hit the other button to comment" and if I think harder about it "HTML textinput in a form".
They see a lot more and are distracted my questions and don't just expect stuff to mostly work even if they don't know exactly what it does. Maybe at least subconsciously, they are bothered by stuff they don't fully understand.
Like, to me, a file is a "real" thing, with nothing below it that enters my thinking unless I'm reading an article about filesystems. If you tell me about a file, I will probably see file icons and explorer windows in my mind, that's what they look like and that's where they live.
Do people with a natural propensity for first order thinking get bothered at least a little bit by these abstractions? Do files feel less "real" to them? Is some part of them trying to figure out what's going on?
And if they are highly technical, is some part of them wondering what the code looks like, how the text is rendered, or maybe even feeling a sense of self disappointment for not deeply understanding what they're doing?
And is pure old fashioned boredom a factor? If I could see something in my head and then draw it in recognizable form, perhaps I wouldn't see the appeal of vector graphics, if I already knew what point on the paper mapped to what point of the picture in my head, maybe i wouldn't want the overhead of loading up the app to drag points around.
I'd just want to draw it in the right spot the first time, and get better every day at doing that.
And then there's spatial memory. If you have a good memory, the endless tweaks of modern UI probably bothers you. If you don't... Well... The new change isn't any more unfamiliar than the old one because you never deeply learned it!
Digital vs analog is such a completely different paradigm. Analog people are basically working with a blank canvas all the time. With digital you're constantly being led by the machine, and if your mind is overflowing with ideas that the programmer never intended, you might hate it.
If you don't have a deep understanding of how things work and what possibilities there are, you might adore having a framework where you only make small deviations in predefined ways, the possibilities are obvious, right in front of you.
We should probably all do more analog stuff, but a pen is definitely an "Outside the comfort zone" thing for me rather than something that feels like an obvious and natural way to work, aside from simple things we do every day.
I have at all times, "two sets of books" or "two maps". Unified by a singular Duty that limits what I can and can't do. My imagination is tied to imaging the next step in my 'journey'.
(something like that anyway, it has subjectivity built into it).
I cannot dump relations to random ideas, I have to understand the 'background'/'whole scene' to clear out the clutter of my imagination and keep my two frames of reference, clear.
The actual dutiful work of computer use is not that terribly difficult intellectually, it is often the kind of flower-arranging drudgery that I used to enjoy a lot in my 'youth' (lol im not that old).
I can understand one set of technologies C/C++ buut the bugs and face-slapping error chasing in programming really begins to wear quite badly.
The only way I can really program is to submit to 'someone else's ruleset' that I don't like or agree with and then endure grinding my way to how I mean it to be, based on my sense of subjective expectation and structure, hand-tied to my categorical imperative. It is possible to make elegant and powerful code like this, inside a company structure.. with uninspiring code architecture, set from the top down.
Buuuut whenever I imagine some novel technology that gets me excited, I can make shallow prototypes of the idea in existing tools and inevitably find that I need to rejig/rework the tooling to get my idea out there. And often that means editing a second set of tooling.
And every single time I have started and attempted this project, it starts off rocky-and-okay, the middle part is absolute hellish grind fighting the system and then the end is a complete drain of all my emotions and an inability to finish, leading to an internal frustation with wasted time.
Then the technology tooling all changes and I have to re-process my understanding because the semantics in the new tech stack are different to the last.
The reationships between ideas are the biggest, slowest chore that wears the most. The concepts in new languages are not terribly interesting, as most are re-arrangments of the same old music...
Every single programming language is set up in such a way that the "glue" between all the concepts, is held by an insider 'brotherhood' of experts. The documentation for plebs tells you one specific way and if you fall off the documentation's instructions, then all other ways are pain and time-wasting death. A simple map of relationships between concepts would save so many man-hours globally, it is insane (but I digress).
The devil-in-the-detail level bugs and jankiness is something only an American man with infinite pleasure - to keep his head cool and his fingers typing - could tolerate.
I'm honestly getting to the stage where I think the only reliable way to make new code, is to control the hardware from the bottom up, and do the software from the bottom up.
Every single middleware provider is another layer of shifting maps, that I have to war with, to make some new tech that works from top to bottom.
And then I'd have to release that code into an environment where my competitors can open up my assets and copy-paste out the novel bits into their own products (or minds) and jiggle the appearance of the code enough for it to look like they made it. I simply cannot do that. It is not allowed under my rules and I have the scar tissue to prove that I can't overcome my own 'programming', my own Duty.. in that regard.
Programming.. I don't think itma for me, even though my novel concepts would make a difference. The industry is just hostile for people who 'think differently' as it is colloquially said to be, but I really mean, the industry is not for people who have a subjective structure they wish to provide as a gift for organizing knowledge.
The "shape" of programming is to be that Shelf on the factory floor that everybody wars over the ever-changing maps on the Shelves. The maps fail to provide coverage of the entire, ever-changing factory itself, and are constantly updated and their meaning constantly changes.
I can not.
I wonder what tech would look like if it were less hostile to out of the box thinkers. Probably we would have a lot of really neat stuff, even though we do things in boring repetitive ways for a reason, it allows people with mediocre skills to produce great results be sacrificing elegance instead of predictability.
When I first got into tech, I did a lot more myself. None of my ideas were at innovative, most were copies of things I'd seen somewhere, but I wasn't familiar with what existing tools were out there, why I'd want to use them, what kind if features I'd want on real world projects, etc.
It wasn't so much that I had these amazing ideas I wanted to share, but I was attached to the genius innovator myth, like on Jimmy Neutron or Blankman or something. Everyone wants to be the on who discovers something great, but none of what I was doing actually seemed to be that great, I was just doing NIH and telling myself it was, plus being too lazy and full of task inertia to learn the industry solutions.
As time went on I got more and more into just using what everyone else uses, exactly the way it was meant to be used, and rethinking my whole approach if I found myself doing anything remotely outside what "the documentation for plebs" wants me to do.
I think it might be pretty cool to be able to think on multiple levels like that, seeing how things work, and having vision of how they could be better, outside of minor incremental improvements to existing tools.
For me, listening carefully and questioning the speaker internally and focusing intensely on the way they are speaking and visualizing the concepts works better. Handwriting interferes with that as I’m too busy rephrasing to fit into my writing rate. My memory is better than the paper at the nuances of the concepts IFF I am intently focused at a semantic level.
I think, like many of these things, they speak to the average experience. That many people benefit from hand writing. But humanity so very varied, and there one size fits all analysis of learning style does really well at picking out the mode, but statistical analysis cuts off the tails and outliers as noise. But being the noise as an individual makes these sorts of statistical teaching methods painful and distracting.
The day I pushed the paper and pen aside and learned the way I learn best was the day school went from being a chore of tedium, a true struggle, to being a delight. I turned around from a barely capable student to getting highest honors from one of the science and engineering universities in the world. Further by honing my ability to understand deeply with just my ears and mind I can carry that into every day life outside a classroom, such as casual conversations or other formats where note taking would be weird. I’ve never missed my handwritten notes, and I literally never take notes and never will again.
I agree that the way of learning concepts is a personal preference and that humanity is varied, but this is not related of how our brain mechanisms work. If learning by writing is a human ability, it would work no matter of your personal preference. It would work for any student who tries to study with method and take notes of the lesson.
Listening to lessons and learning is a romantic way of studying, but I'm not sure how practical it is when your test is at the end of a course of 4/6 months. Plus all the others course that you follow at the same time, with the labs exercises, it all make a good amount of material to put in your brain just by listening. In addition to that I would not be able to listen to professors explaining concepts for 6/7h and just learning them immediately. I would fall asleep in the middle of the lessons if I don't actively take notes. A lesson is not just a repetition of a book, but the connection of multiple concepts with linearity, done by a professional expert that knows the subject and usually add small details or new way of seeing things, that books don't do them. Notes help students take notes of this and re-use the concepts when studying for the tests, improving their visualization ability.
What you list is what works for you - and if objectively didn’t work for me. That’s why the outliers like me get ground under. People say “clearly by my experience your experience can’t work, you must do things my way.” (Not saying you’re meaning this so directly but that’s how it gets applied at school)
I would say it’s not a preference specifically but different humans have different facility with their innate abilities. Why would we consider learning by note taking to be an undifferentiated ability but athletic abilities are differentiated? The reality is some people learn better in different ways because our brains are differentiated in their ability. Yes I learn from note taking, but not as well as through different modes because my faculties in those modes are exceptional relative to the mean. But statistical analyses of learning say I must learn better by the statistical mode, despite the fact outlier can and do exist on all the dimensions of learning modalities.
Obviously from a policy point of view they should try to teach everyone the most common ways of learning. But we also need to be able to teach to the outliers as well and how to identify who to differentiate. My daughter is different like me, so I send her to a private school that focuses on differentiated learning - and she thrives where she would have suffered like I did in public school. “No child left behind” means “no average child left behind, the outliers are ground down to be average”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X2...
I cannot access the paper right now, but the abstract mentions that most research might have been confounded by the distractions provided by computers rather that by typing/handwriting.
Which is actually a big problem, but suggests that there is a need for better tools --for example support of 'activities' at the Desktop Environment level, such as KDE, which might only give access to a subset of the available applications. This would allow one to have archived and searchable notes typed at full speed --rather than the slow handwriting which might be hard on the wrists-- and not suffer from the distraction problem.
I would even go one step further: while I was translating a book, I used a dictionary on my computer to check some words from time to time. Nowadays I would just use wiktionary to do so, but that means that google might suck you into a rabbit hole at the first failing of will; it would be even better to have the ability to block any other sites when in this activity.
Most peoples, even "digital natives" are much worse at inputting freeform information on a computer in the first place. The hardware/software to make this possible has only been recently available. Basically before tablet proliferation, free form input was a major waste of time at best ; so it has only been 10 years (barely) that you could argue the tools were sufficient. And even then it only works if you buy a sufficiently expensive tool that is sufficiently fast and precise (started making sense at first iPad Air era).
So of course, they are comparing people using a skill they had decade(s) to hone versus a skill that can only have been acquired very recently.
And I think it doesn't make sense to have pure typing vs pure handwriting, it often all the little things around the written language that help tremendously learning and recalling. The way the information is architected with various levels of "call to attention", small drawings, schemas, etc...
A handwritten wall of notes is way more useless than a typed wall of notes because at least in the second case, it's gonna be easier to restructure it and make it much more "parseable". Then again, having to re-write it would increase the time/effort spent on it and translate as a "better learning". If you matched the time/effort on the typing part I doubt you would see a difference. But the reality is that the guy who typed stuff did it for efficiency in the first place so it's more likely than he won't spend as much time re-reading the notes which of course will translate in worse learning whatever that means.
In the end all of this goes back to nonsense that learning things "by heart" is useful and a useful way to grade/rank peoples competence/capacity for comprehension. Handwriting like learning by heart is something that favors women (they are much more applied and they generally have much better handwriting) and it is not even surprising that this is pushed as truth.
I have a preference for graph paper because I can place any idea anywhere on the page exactly where I want it to go. I only use one side of the paper so I don't have to flip back and forth between pages to remember what I wrote.
Using looseleaf paper and a central folder might be more viable for some people vs. a notebook. A nice, new, specially ordered blank notebook can be intimidating to write in. You also have to keep track of a journal to use it. Looseleaf paper is a much smaller mental investment to get the habit started - you can just throw it away if you mess up.
I love definitive reviews like this.
YMMV.
https://www.sacrideo.us/a-quick-review-of-the-diplomat-nexus...
The way this reads is pretty hysterical. I believe he's on here as user "arcfide".
Fully agree with the parent comment about it being like clearing out RAM!
I have also ordered an A6 "pocket" notebook where I want to write one or two sentences or just key words per entry as condensed conclusions to my thoughts or sayings or quotes i heard or read. It should be this condensed book of knowledge and philosophy where long form is not exactly suitable for it.
PS: in my first month, i wrote a lot because there was a lot on my mind. But after a while your brains gets a bit quieter because you are doing this "exercise" and you will go through a short phase where you will be looking for something to write about. That might last a week or two until you settle into the habit and write only when you feel like it. I kinda miss writing when I have nothing to write about so sometimes i just write meaningless thoughts just for the sake of writing. Not all the time, just sometimes.
Journaling off and on since 1987, I have a few rules for myself when journaling:
1. Write the time, day of week, date, month, and year for every entry.
2. Don't worry about lapses in writing. Just write a new entry when I can.
3. Allow my topics to be spontaneous. I sometimes have a structure I'd like to use, but allow freedom in any moment.
4. Relish mistakes, smears, stains on the paper by labeling them, e.g. "tea stain while studying with Akane" (real example!)
5. Just enjoy the process of writing.
As to what you ought to write, maybe start by transcribing some of your favourite poems, song lyrics, quotations, etc. Don't wait until you have some "big thoughts" that are "worthy" of a fancy notebook. Your first step is to see if it feels lie fun to you.
I also keep a journal, but I do that on computer because I value being able to electronically search it.
Shopping lists, random thoughts, UML-like diagrams of code, sketches of possible art pieces, knots, etc. Just anything.
When it comes to practicality... Let's say one does not buy a fountain pen to be practical ;-) These things are fairly maintenance heavy and prone to accidents. There's a reason they have been superseded by several other pen types these days.
Fountain pen is a tool from a different era. One that excels at putting ink on paper in a very comfortable / stylish / craftsman manner...
The funny thing was that some years later in 2016, I became highly interested in learning other writing systems for fun (and which I talk about on a blog of mine at [1]), which eventually also evolved into a newfound obsession with handwriting that I still practice today. Its really changed the way I see the written word and is a good way to remind oneself how letters on a screen are really the culmination of a few thousand years of scribes iterating through the older sharp, rigid and awkward letters and gradually evolving them into smoother and more fluid forms which can be drawn much faster by hand.
Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me. Yes we learned handwriting by rote repetition of letters in the first few months of first grade. But then we started writing real things.
Even in college we were still expected to write essay answers on a piece of paper by hand. In high school we wrote entire essays – up to 1500 words – by hand at school for our literature exams. All our notes in class were handwritten at every level of schooling.
Laptops started becoming a thing in college and most people quickly realized digital note-taking is far too clunky. You need the expressiveness and speed of handwriting to truly capture an idea.
Hell even today I always have a notebook next to my keyboard when I work. The seamless transition between writing, drawing, and scribbling is unparalleled.
Perhaps my memory of primary school's a bit fuzzy in this regard, but the point I intended to make was that handwriting was an unpleasant but necessary thing I had to do to get through school and was not something I particularly enjoyed for this reason. The English literature exams were always the worst because of all the darn essays I had to write by hand. On the other hand, me and my cohort got free school laptops from the Australian government in Year 9 [0] which were great for note-taking in class and took the pressure off the need to rely on my at-the-time mediocre and slow handwriting. While having some significant restrictions including the blocking of external programs and an Internet filter that blocked Facebook, many of us enjoyed hacking these laptops to make it run games or other programs we were not supposed to run, lol. Also we got to get them unlocked and keep them after graduating high school.
These days I see much greater value in having good handwriting, and as others have said around, handwritten notes actually help with memory recall far greater than a typed note ever will. Typed notes still have their place as they can be searched much more quickly than handwritten notes, but I found that handwritten notes are much better for notetaking important and critical procedures (e.g. on-call incident response) so that they can be remembered better. Always good to have not just 1 notetaking option, for sure.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Education_Revolution
If this is the best demonstration, it means there is no advantage - this is just an illustration of the awfully designed lecture system where any copying is required at all instead of having the full transcript readily available and spending the time to actually listen
Note taking is a skill and practice makes perfect. That and SQ3R has helped me get so much better at taking better notes. Plus alls I need is a some grid paper and a pencil, though my analog system has gotten considerably more sophisticated over time
1. https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/the-most-effective-way-i-kno...
No fusty article in the Economist could convince me that cursive handwriting is a skill worth saving. When it came to taking notes in college, I realized I was lousy at taking notes by hand, that I’d pay more attention to the lecturer and wind up with few notes. When I took a laptop, I realized I could basically take dictation while still paying attention to what was said.
Doodling programs out on a notebook does work better for me than doing similar on an iPad, however.
It backfired, and my writing got worse. It was painful, not fun, and I didn't care about it. So my sloppy writing got sloppier the more I did it.
Now, I'm realizing that they all failed to teach me to write correctly, probably because they didn't actually know the difference. They all just remembered that their teachers had corrected bad penmanship that way, but without realizing that there was probably additional instruction involved in how to hold the pencil, and how to move the hand and arm properly to get good writing.
I've often thought about working on my handwriting, but there's very little benefit now other than personal pride, and I've got so many other things I want to do.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
https://journal.psych.ac.cn/adps/EN/10.3724/SP.J.1042.2015.0...
To me it means that you could get benefits of writing when you are typing by adjusting what you are actually doing. For instance, you could re-read and edit what you have typed after the fact. Or you could deliberately try to phrase the notes in your own words.
When I was in university I was reading a lot of this literature, and came to the same conclusion as many of the researchers – the problem seems to be that typists just type too fast, and default to writing down everything a lecturer says instead of synthesizing/summarizing information as they go (which requires actual understanding).
So we developed our (short-form digital notecard) format in the hopes that it would encourage users to slow down a bit and actually think about the notes they were making, and compartmentalize them as they went. We haven't actually done any studies ourselves, so I have no idea if it actually helps our average user, but for me personally it has made me take better notes.
Mildly tangential but this is also why we have decided not to add any LLM features to our app yet – although very tempting to add the hot new thing, I personally feel that outsourcing your thinking to an LLM (in the case of a PKM system / "second brain") will almost certainly be a net negative for most people.
1. I get compliments about how nice my handwriting is.
2. It really does help me to remember details. I don't need to go back through my notes (I rarely do these days) but the mere fact of having written it down seems to lock it more tightly into my memory.
Maybe I'll setup a little, completely un-scaleable online service whereby I'll write a hand written letter and send it to a chosen address on behalf of anyone willing to pay.
No ransom notes.
Hmm. Maybe for you but perhaps you could back that claim up regarding the rest of the population. For me it matters not whether it be handwritten or typed, so long as it's there. Content is king.
This is a very strained line of argumentation. The raw fact is that the typists are twice as fast.
Laptops in class don't work. Handouts that are copies of the presentation don't work.
Leave the laptop in your room. Just bring a spiral notebook to class and a couple pens. It's the best way to learn from a lecture.
Bonus: years later you'll enjoy going through your notebooks again.
My handwriting is atrocious (right from early school days my teachers have complained about it) and yet i write. Writing is personal; you are engaged in communicating with yourself and not with others; thus it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as you freely express yourself.
https://abc7news.com/cursive-california-schools-governor-new...