16 Apr Disfluency and handwriting
Writing is slower than typing, and transcribes less information. That’s why it’s better.
A study has found that students who take lecture notes by hand rather than by computer are able to recall more of the lecture.
Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, while skeptical of this research, muses that “with handwriting, the very act of putting it down forces you to focus on what’s important. Maybe it helps you think better.”
Merely transcribing every word the professor utters can diminish the ability to process new information. Writing by hand is tiring, and limiting, which forces note takers into a dialogue with the information: processing, reframing, sorting, summarizing, storing. With handwriting, especially cursive, students have been shown to be better able to retain information and generate ideas.
There’s relevance in this finding even for those long past the days of taking lecture notes. It speaks to the value of disfluency: a sense of mental difficulty that force us to think more deeply and to interact more comprehensively with information. Things like reading ornate fonts, trying to remember a phone number, interacting with the text of a book by writing comments in the margins—anything that forces us to slow down and struggle a little with the “data” in front of us, whatever form that data happens to take.
“Learning to see is the basis for learning all the arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things.”—Flannery O’Connor
No Comments