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Handwriting may be a good way to reinforce what you've already learned. But it can also act as a crutch which disengages your brain before you've processed new
by elevation 4y ago
Handwriting may be a good way to reinforce what you've already learned. But it can also act as a crutch which disengages your brain before you've processed new information more deeply.
I have a coworker who hand writes nearly all technical information spoken in meetings and 1 on 1 conversations, and yet remains incredibly ineffective at recall.
The problem is she lacks a mental model of the topic, so she has no structure around which to organize incoming facts. Being unable to assess the relative importance of a new fact, she dutifully transcribes everything she hears -- but never becomes able to summarize or reason about it. This also means that she's unable to correct herself when she's mistranscribed something, such as substituting Gigabytes with Gigahertz. Little of what she writes is worth retaining.
If you're unclear about what's being discussed, it can be so much more effective to put the pencil down and ask a few questions.
- jonny_eh 4y agoSounds to me like the note taking isn't her issue.
- shakow 4y agoI don't want to disparage your colleague; but the way you describe it, it looks more like an her issue than a handwriting issue.
- lzooz 4y agoI think your coworker is simply daft.
- DoughnutHole 4y agoSounds to me like her note-taking is pretty critical for her. It's very difficult to piece together cause and affect here. Is her memory & mental model bad because she's using notes as a "crutch", or is that crutch the only reason she's functional in any way. To expand on the crutch analogy, if someone has a game leg taking away their crutch isn't going to improve their walking. Speaking as someone who has problems with working memory, I take a lot of notes because I can't trust my brain to effectively parse what requires long term storage. I might understand everything perfectly clearly, and then days/hours/minutes later it's gone. Note-taking prevents information being lost to the aether, and revision helps commit stuff to long term memory.
- bostonsre 4y agoI would guess her handwriting words per minute is not fast enough to keep up with conversations. I would find it difficult to pay attention and understand stuff if I'm constantly trying to drain the buffer of words coming in and I would have to start throwing some 409s and would miss some stuff. At least with typing, I can keep up with conversations when I need to take notes for a given discussion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]