A new study—conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people remember lectures better when they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones.
What’s more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn’t seem to improve their quality. Even if you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it doesn’t make a difference. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better.
It’s a very interesting topic. I’ve tried both over a number of years, in formal study as well as at work, and found that it depends on the scenario and the topic.
In university lectures, which are live and information dense, I captured far more detail when typing, so it was much easier to review my notes weeks later and remember what they meant. My hand written notes tended to be scrappy, and while I remembered what they meant the next day, a few weeks later they became cryptic even to myself.
If the topic is less information dense, and only a few details need to be recorded, written notes work very well. My brain remembers queues like where on the page text was written, and what I was thinking and feeling when I wrote something down.
If the topic is dense, but you can pause the speaker (eg. online learning) then I’m not sure which is better. Typing notes in a digital format does have the major advantages of being easier to search later, easier to rearrange and archive, and are less likley to get lost or damaged.
Regardless of how the notes were initially taken, I have found two effective ways to make them more memorable in revision: i) re-writing key points and drawing charts etc on paper ii) re-writing concepts in my own words, usually on a computer due to the ease of editing wording.
I’m currently experimenting a little with sketchnotes aka visual notes, but not sure yet if the extra time it takes is worth the tradeoff. I’m not a good drawer, and have a tendency toward perfectionism in my notes.
Would love to hear other people’s experiences and opinions.
Personally, I take digital notes. The advantage of handwriting notes is rendered redundant from using the techniques you can learn here (Memory Palace, Number Systems, Visual Alphabet, etc).
I’m not sure how familiar you are with memory techniques, the forum says this is your first post. If you’re new to the art of memory then first, welcome! Secondly, if you don’t know about it, I think you’d benefit from the Memory Palace technique. You won’t need to re-write the key points or anything like that (unless you find it fun!). I’ll find the link to the wiki and update this post
I’ve seen such studies and tend to believe them. It’s my belief that the more engaged one is the stronger the attachments. Taking notes by hand requires putting things in one’s own words and also the manual dexterity of writing. It’s a general statement of course and it depends on the individual’s process and how much review he does.
I went to college before laptops or even desktops. The courses I took were all rather dense, technical subjects. I would carefully review my lecture notes and rewrite them in my own words in careful hand written text. This level of engagement served me very well.
Hey Vinven and zvuv, thanks for the replies. I have written a short bio now in the introduction forum here in case you’re interested in my background. I did my undergrad degree pre-laptops, and my postgrad degree with a laptop - was interesting seeing how the world had changed.
I am familiar with Memory Palaces etc, but not an expert. Let me give more context on the problem I’m currently trying to solve. For a professional certification, I’m trying to memorize around 50 handwritten pages of notes with about 10 key facts per page, so around 500 facts. I could use a 500 loci memory palace to memorize that, but as a novice that would require a lot of effort to develop a palace that big and load it with images. Little of the information needs to be kept in order.
The reason I’m so interested in this topic is I found Lynne Kelly’s discussion in Memory Craft on medieaval manuscripts fascinating. In it she talks about how scribes left wide margins and wide line spacing, so the reader could embelish the page in various ways to make it more memorable, and add linked facts. For an extreme example, see the Smithfield Decretals
Last week I went through about 60% of the course and took handwritten notes. I’ve just converted most of them to SRS cards. When I went back to my handwritten notes to design the cards, I realized I often needed to go back to the source material to get more details to design the cards well. That being said, I feel I remembered what I had captured in handwritting better than if I had typed it. This backs up the theory I had about typed notes being a more comprehensive record (more imporant in some ways), but handwritten notes were more memorable (more important in other ways).
For now I’m going to use both the handwritten notes (with gradually added embelishments) along with SRS cards in parallel.
Curious if people who are more experienced in memory techniques would take a different approach (eg would an expert in memory palaces skip the handwritten notes and flashcards, and go straight for using a palace for 500 semi-connected facts?)
My approach would be to understand the material and organize it. I am averse to just memorizing undigested material. The order in which the material is presented may not be the most efficient way to organize it. In some cases 10 facts might collapse down to just a couple or they might need expansion and even further subdivision. It’s also possible that the material might naturally separate into two or more subjects suggesting the use of multiple places. In fact for this kind of volume, I’d be looking for an excuse to do this.
Once I feel I have a grasp of the material I choose a structure to hold it. Usually a “palace”. For myself, I often invent these and draw them - drawing really helps one engage with the material. Drawing does not have be well done or pretty. The process is more important than the finished product.
For a subject like this, I would group the material into chambers with titles. Within the chambers I may just use walls and corners or I might add another container, a chest of drawers, coat rack, book shelf etc as nested mini palaces to group associated items.
If I have trouble making an item stick, I invent a story about how it came into my possession or why it’s in there.
This related article might interest people. It’s on general writing, but it got me thinking about other ways that writing on paper might change the way a brain works. There’s a different kind of planning involved, because writing on paper can’t be edited as easily.
The reason these writers choose old-school tools is that when it comes to writing, computers are too efficient and make changing things too easy, and this ease can slow things down. Writing by hand allows writers who pen their drafts to proceed in a linear fashion rather than continually being tempted to rearrange words on the screen before they know precisely where the story is going