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A quote from the article: "...a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science... claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives
by fsloth 12y ago
A quote from the article:
"...a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science... claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject."
I find it odd that when some praise handwriting as a great mental tool, others obviously consider this as a some sort of ... ailment?
I assure you, handwriting is not a symptom of slow typing speed, and it does not need to be remedied by typing faster.
With Vim I can touch type quite fast enough. But the typing speed is useless unless I can understand what I am supposed to write.
Writing on paper improves my thinking to a point where I'm obviously partially incapacitated when implementing algorithms if I don't have a pen and paper at hand. And this is no exaggeration, I've tried in the past to go long periods without paper.
There is a threshold in algorithmic complexity after which I cannot hold all the variables in my head that I need to work out the solution.
The paper and pen feels like giving me 3x amount the working memory and increased reasoning skills.
Maybe the act of handwriting stimulates more areas of the brain, thus creating more associations along the way?
- ObviousScience 12y agoI type rather quickly (fast enough that I can type faster than I can compose), but still prefer pen and paper when reasoning. It's because the pen and paper mixes diagramming, text, and non-linear note taking in a completely different way. There's just no good typing analog to drawing a box around something, and then an arrow to another boxed item with some notes next to the line about the relationship. There's no good typing analog to writing notes off to the side, and then notes on those notes, and arrows between them. (There are okay mouse analogs, but constantly shifting my hands from keyboard to mouse is fairly annoying; much more so than just writing.) It's not that I can get a computer to do those things with various editors, but rather, that typing in the instructions to do them is fundamentally mentally different than actually doing the motions of the boxes and arrows by hand. (My pet theory is that my brain is using information about the tactile movements to store relationship information in a way that it doesn't understand for digital documents, but I am not a psychologist.) This difference has nothing to do with typing speed, but rather, the nature of the input device you're using.
- hvidgaard 12y agoThe main benefit in writing with pen and paper (to me), is the fact that I can write anywhere, make arrows, comments that doesn't disrupt reading the main part, and draw various very helpful graphics. I think I would have spend significantly more time to understand most of what I learned in CS if I only used a computer to take notes.