5 ms·

Typing notes is probably the worst way to encode things into your memory. There's been plenty of research on this and I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but

by dhosek 5y ago

Typing notes is probably the worst way to encode things into your memory. There's been plenty of research on this and I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but the process of handwriting notes does a lot to help you remember things even if you never look at those notes again. There are people with disabilities that prevent them from handwriting notes, but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes.

gjulianm 5y ago
> but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes. Completely disagree here. You need to find the setup that works for you, and for a lot of people that setup will be taking notes in a computer. And I know this because in my class me and a few friends took computer notes, and we did really well. In my personal case, my handwriting is terrible and gets worse by the hour. By the fourth lecture of the day, my paper notes were an incomprehensible mess. Reformatting, organizing and sorting those notes took quite some time and then searching or referencing other pages was impossible. When taking LaTeX notes, I could write at the same speed as when I was writing by hand, got less tiring, could pay more attention to the lecture (I can just go on and write things on the computer without looking and worry about them later, but I can't handwrite without looking). Then later I could go back, rewrite the parts that needed rewriting, reference the parts that needed referencing, put graphs, paste links, whatever. And it was really helpful to have a document where I could iterate and improve the notes as my knowledge and understanding of the contents improved. You know how they say that you don't really understand something until you can explain it? Well, rewriting my notes was my process to understand things. And it would be impossible to have done it if I had to take paper notes. Also, I could do the exercises on the same document (in an appendix) and quickly reference the theorems, and also work with my friends to correct/review the exercises. Again, impossible to do with paper notes.

by dhosek 5y ago

gjulianm 5y ago

> but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes. Completely disagree here. You need to find the setup that works for you, and for a lot of people that setup will be taking notes in a computer. And I know this because in my class me and a few friends took computer notes, and we did really well. In my personal case, my handwriting is terrible and gets worse by the hour. By the fourth lecture of the day, my paper notes were an incomprehensible mess. Reformatting, organizing and sorting those notes took quite some time and then searching or referencing other pages was impossible. When taking LaTeX notes, I could write at the same speed as when I was writing by hand, got less tiring, could pay more attention to the lecture (I can just go on and write things on the computer without looking and worry about them later, but I can't handwrite without looking). Then later I could go back, rewrite the parts that needed rewriting, reference the parts that needed referencing, put graphs, paste links, whatever. And it was really helpful to have a document where I could iterate and improve the notes as my knowledge and understanding of the contents improved. You know how they say that you don't really understand something until you can explain it? Well, rewriting my notes was my process to understand things. And it would be impossible to have done it if I had to take paper notes. Also, I could do the exercises on the same document (in an appendix) and quickly reference the theorems, and also work with my friends to correct/review the exercises. Again, impossible to do with paper notes.