14 ms·
The benefits of note-taking by hand
- Hokusai 6y ago> Leonardo da Vinci wrote: “…the more minutely you describe, the more you will confuse the mind of the reader and the more you will remove him from knowledge of the thing described. Therefore it is necessary to make a drawing … as well as to describe …” 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.
- emerged 6y agoI take extremely detailed hierarchical notes all day, using software similar to org mode. Enough that it isn't feasible to use handwriting. But when it comes to working out a particularly difficult problem, there's no substitute for pen and paper IMO. I'd really like for the two to be better integrated, but writing with a stylus doesn't feel good to me.
- cgriswald 6y agoI took notes on an iPad Pro for a semester in college. It worked well and there were some advantages. Infinitely expanding pages, moving notes around, pages only exist when they’re necessary, etc. 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.
- grugagag 6y agoThis could be aleviates by adding a special matte screen protector that gives pen and paper feel
- Aeolun 6y agoBut the screen still glows. Paper is not supposed to glow. At least that’s my entirely emotional argument against writing on an iPad.
- grugagag 6y agoYes but at least you don’t get the stylus sliding on glass feeling, the feedback is closer to but not exactly like pen and papet. It’s a tradeoff
- CharlesW 6y ago> But the thing that I missed most was the feel of pencil on paper. Has anyone tried Paperlike? I'm interested in the "feel" and how it affects display quality. https://paperlike.com/ https://paperlike.com/
- dchuk 6y agoI have a cheap matte screen protector from Amazon on my iPad Pro, and it works fantastically. Completely changes the writing experience
- mindri0t 6y agoI have the first iteration of it and it is very very nice in terms of feel but I found it impacted screen quality more than I could tolerate. I believe this has improved in later versions and I’m somewhat tempted to try one of the current ones. I was really torn when I took it off, it does feel like paper and it even feels nicer with your hands not just the pencil, at the time it really damaged colour accuracy and also made the screen look like it was composed of rainbow crystals, it had a tiny prism effect on every element of the matte surface.
- CharlesW 6y agoThanks for sharing your experience with it!
- mongol 6y agoWould love to but my handwriting is awful. Don't know why. I write so cramped, perhaps I am holding the pen too hard. And my writing deteriorated over the years. Became almost illegible in university. Today my hand makes the least effort possible when I write. It is like it wants to drop the pen as soon as possible, but is forced to hold on by its conscious master. The keyboard is a bliss for me, it allows me to make structured notes effortlessly. But I still wish my relationship to handwriting was better.
- freehunter 6y agoThe reason your handwriting gets worse is because the more you type, the less you write. You’ve fallen out of practice, and the only key to nice handwriting is to keep practicing and keep writing.
- kitd 6y agoAgreed. 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.
- joecool1029 6y agoSorry, I've heard that bullshit excuse for years. I moved to typing because writing was so laborious for me. My handwriting is more or less the same as it was 10+ years ago at this point and it's equally slow and illegible on both hands.
- Jtsummers 6y agoMy handwriting is horrendous, particularly by the end of an extended writing period. But taking notes, for me, was rarely about reading them. The act of writing helped me remember so much better (especially if I'm not writing a transcription, but a summary and examples). My math/CS notes were understandable, in general, in college due to the ability to use shorthand notations or to write things in clearly hierarchical forms (pseudocode, proofs, solving math problems) where the structure aided in interpreting if the handwriting failed. 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).
- zb1plus 6y agoI take notes on an iPad using an Apple pencil. It seems to right balance between using the digital to organize and correct things and the cognitive benefits to handwriting.
- sandeeps_ 6y agoIs the experience of using Apple Pencil with iPad very close to a real paper and pen? I’m tempted to get one myself.
- mattacular 6y agoIt's pretty close. The tactile sensation of writing against paper versus glass is different. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI endeavoured when starting a new job last year to be totally digital - I use MS OneNote on a Surface Pro. The experience is very close to using a gel pen on paper for me. The handwriting recognition is remarkably good - I don't really write much but occasionally I'm searching for something and it finds my marginal notes. 20 years of almost exclusive keyboard writing has taken is toll on my already poor handwriting.
- wenc 6y agoCue the HN note-taking crowd.... 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).
- bluehatbrit 6y agoI think I'm in general agreement with you. I spent quite a while trying out different note taking apps. Super simple ones like iA and Bear, over to things like org mode. Eventually I just settled on pencil and paper and I've been really happy with that for a few years now. 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.
- jl2718 6y agoWhat ever happened to mini digital notepads? They were terrible but must have since improved. I want a stylus for my phone, and I want instant access to blank page as soon as I pull it out.
- nicbou 6y agoThe Remarkable and the Supernote seem to fill that role. 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.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago> Researchers have found that note-taking associated with keyboarding involves taking notes verbatim in a way that does not involve processing information, and so have called this “non-generative” note-taking. 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.
- bakul 6y agoNote taking by hand implies making your hand draw the right shapes in the right sequence (& "verifying" them by reading) so in effect more of your brain in involved in actual processing. This may have a larger effect than reframing in your own words? [Speculation as I rarely took notes. Even the process of note taking distracted me!]
- jjoonathan 6y agoThere's a "Price is Right" effect too: more processing = more engagement with the material = better, right up until you can't keep up with the lecture and then it falls apart. 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.
- jonahbenton 6y agoIt took a long time but I migrated my handwriting workflow over to a Remarkable tablet (v1, my v2 coming in a week or so). 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.
- jjoonathan 6y ago> 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. 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.
- amelius 6y agoYes, this is also the sole reason why I'm not using e-ink displays yet.
- BrianSenator 6y ago
- radium3d 6y agoI must do it differently with a keyboard. I usually use bullet points for all note taking and I do process it, in fact have more time to process it and think about it because I spend less time drawing symbols. Must be a tough one to measure for a study.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoPeople are shaped by the tools that they use. There are significant physical changes in the brain when writing is learned for the first time compared to someone who never has learned writing. 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.
- AndrewOMartin 6y agoThe article appears to conflate notetaking by hand versus notetaking on a keyboard with summarised notes versus verbatim notes. 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.
- mraza007 6y agoThis is why i got my self a remarkable tablet so i don’t have to deal with paper anymore
- soniman 6y agoThis is going to get downvoted but note taking is yak shaving. Don't waste any time thinking about optimal note taking.
- bserge 6y agoWell, I disagree. I can't CTRL-F my paper notes, and I've got a ton of them. I need to digitize them, fortunately Google Lens can actually understand most of my scribbles, which is really impressive. 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.
- UperSpaceGuru 6y agoTry Livescribe. I've been using it for years & I can sort of CTRL-F (CMD-F) my notes. I usually export notes to people. I'm surprise more technologies like livescribe doesn't exist.
- bserge 6y agoOMG, I can't believe I forgot about these smart pens! I remember reading about one ~15 years ago and thinking "who would ever need this?". And somehow I never came across them again, wow. It might actually be a game changer for my notes/sketches! Thank you!
- intrasight 6y agoRead that and wondered why you would struggle with moving the cursor one character forward. Then realized that I live in Emacs and that you had meant something else;)
- bserge 6y agoYeah I'm just a normie, and CTRL-F is search in seemingly most software :D
- projektfu 6y agoSometimes I just feel like I can't move the cursor forward at all. :)
- samatman 6y agoThis is one of the advantages of macOS, all the familiar GUI shortcuts live on the command key. 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.
- hajimemash 6y agoEver since the GTP-3 blog posts came out, every single article I read now makes me wonder- am I being fooled again into thinking a article was written by a human? Thanks u/adolos haha
- tokai 6y agoMaybe a controversial opinion here, but; 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.
- joecool1029 6y agoHave to agree. I spent a lot of classes struggling to keep up because my handwriting was too slow and poor. Like others said, I discovered fountain pens helped but it was not a cure for the problem. 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.
- projektfu 6y agoI agree. I used to fall asleep in classes taking notes. I ditched the notebook and started intensely focusing on the lecturer and trying to listen actively. Attention improved and comprehension skyrocketed. As long as what was covered was also found in printed material like a book, I was much better off. 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.
- paulpauper 6y agoIf you IQ is high enough, note taking is often not necessary unless the material is very detailed or complicated. working memory and long-term memory both positively correlated with IQ. In the high school i went to, the smartest kids in my class were able to get good grades on tests without taking notes.
- baldfat 6y ago13 years ago I bought a Tablet PC (Motion PC) with OneNote and I bought a portable shotgun mic by sony. 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.
- pier25 6y agoI went back to fountain pen + Rhodia journal while waiting for the perfect digital device to solve this. 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.
- samatman 6y agoThe tips of an Apple Pencil are an inexpensive consumable, for what it's worth. 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.
- afrojack123 6y agoThe year was 1970. Fred Flintstone time travelled to the future. Amazed at the efficiency of digital note-taking, he renounces hand-written notes. Fred Flintstone now uses his memory to remember actions that build things, not useless, easily searchable facts like fire is good.
- agumonkey 6y agoPhysical involvement is probably diffusing stimuli in many many parts of our brains. Because anything kinetic was extremely important to our lives. Probably creates symbolic memories coupled with musculoskeletal ones.
- SenpaiHurricane 6y agoI recommend to use stone tablets...
- hajimemash 6y agoWow, for 30 years I thought cursive was a fluffy, largely-useless style technique. Didn't know it had practical uses for writing faster.
- tomjen3 6y agoCursive can be faster, if you have a slanted desk, ideally can slant the paper a bit and that you use a fountain pen.
- Paianni 6y agoMy typing is much faster than my handwriting, so if I am able to type I always opt for that. Slide changes when my notes for them are unfinished are really annoying.
- criddell 6y agoIf you believe the research, the slower speed of handwriting is a feature not a problem.
- rsamvit 6y agoWhat about writing on a phone? I've been taking a lot of mobile notes and have found it to be a very convenient optimal point between slower, intentional writing vs digital format and accessibility.
- FalconSensei 6y agoyou mean, typing/swiping on the phone? Also less useful for retention, I would say. It's only slower than typing on the computer because of the inconvenient keyboard size. But you are still just pressing buttons that are millimeters apart. While handwriting you have to actually make different shapes. For me, optimal is to use something like OneNote, which you can use with a pen (iPad/Surface), and it recognizes what you handwrite
- codecutter 6y agoI like to write using pen and paper. It may be slower, but I tend to recollect the content much better instead of typed notes.
- m0zg 6y agoI'm convinced that it's impossible to properly learn most complex subjects from a lecture if you take notes on a laptop or (especially) don't take notes at all. What little knowledge managed to stick to my brain in school, I owe to taking copious handwritten notes, and then looking at them a few times later. You are _forced_ to understand, since you can't possibly write down everything, and the ease of capturing formulas and graphs is not to be underestimated either. 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.
- FalconSensei 6y agoIn my experience, the parts from math and physics that required a lot of note taking were things more related to memorization instead of understanding, like formulas. Which, to be fair, seems to be the most of it, but anyway, there's a big difference from memorizing and understanding.
- m0zg 6y agoI've found it completely useless to memorize all but the most fundamental formulas without understanding their derivation. If I just memorize a formula, it's gone 3-6 months later. I need to understand how it came about if I want to retain it long term.
- sigmonsays 6y agopersonally I have a notebook and when learning new things or in meetings for building software. I write key things down. Just this alone allows me to remember more, recall things much later and provide structure for exploring and learning more. Plus old notebooks are kinda fun to skim through and look back on when updating a resume.
- somewhereoutth 6y agoI am reminded of one of the Arthurian legends - King Arthur was given a sword and a scabbard. The sword meant he could not be defeated in battle, but the scabbard prevented his mortal wounding. He prized the sword over the scabbard, and according to one legend left the scabbard behind to face his foe. He won the fight, but in doing so was indeed mortally wounded, and so met his end. 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.
- gaurangagg 6y agoI have taken over 10K notes in last 9 years and this is what I do -- I take a lot of hand-written notes and then I type down everything -- I believe it reinforces everything for me as I do the latter after a few days. And thank you all for sharing such insightful comments.
- wussboy 6y agoWriting things down lets other parts of your brain know what’s going on. I reach for my notebook a dozen times a day. Often just writing my question down makes the answer obvious.
- wdb 6y agoI like the combination of paper and fountain pen, a bit thicker than normal, feels so much better than using the iPad :) WFH left me doing less note taking, though. As I just audio record the important meetings.
- vira28 6y agoBought both Notability and Goodnotes this week; Their macOS apps (I feel) really terrible. How do you folks use across mac and iPad. (Multiplatform is a big thing which I feel missing in both apps). Any suggestion? Thanks.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoThe last time I actually wrote something down I couldn't decipher my own handwriting so yeah about that...