My notes arenāt fancy, and I want to improve my handwriting. Hereās a photo of some old programming notes just to start the thread. Iām working on improving this at the moment, so Iām curious about what other people are doing.
Itās been almost exactly a year since I was really taking notes. Before they got ruined, I was using lined paper and cheap duotangs, although a 3 ringed binder would be nicer to work in.
Iāll write notes with whatever I have laying around, but gel pens are usually what I prefer. The attached notes were done with a pen from a 12 pack of āStudioā gel pens from the dollar store.
My notes are very messy and contained a lot of corrections using arrows, scratched out words, interjecting thoughts, random doodles and scribbles etc.
Theyāre usually as terse as I can make them, and I usually put the page numbers (or cite youtube title and channel, or article title and website) above the current section of notes.
I was experimenting with mindmaps recently. You might recognize the notes from the article cited Does anyone else use hand gestures while encoding in a memory palace? Is this okay for competitions? - #13 by cedar there. The other side also has a mind map, doesnāt bother me if I see notes from the opposite side while reading / writing them.
My conclusion? (your own) Mindmaps are easy to read, so they make good notes. It would be easy to convert the pieces from a mindmap into a memory palace if you want, and to make them work more like a memory palace themselves if you work towards that.
I wouldnāt want to take notes using mindmaps in real time, instead Iād use a lot of seriously condensed words, partial sentences, and arrows pointing to key words.
I also use a set of small A6 notebooks, about 20 of them, which will fit in my bag (or a large pocket), taking one of them with me when I go out and walk my memory palaces. Most of them are also 5 mm grid, but not all. So all topics are in their own notebooks. Anything new, and out comes a new notebook.
I use 5 mm grid exercise books for notes which donāt come with me, again organised by topic, covered with different coloured wrapping papers and labelled on the backs.
I find the grid paper keeps things really neat, plus I use little boxes to tick off things like ādoneā, āin the palaceā or āonto cardsā.
I use cards - plain playing card size - for SRS - I donāt like technology because it doesnāt feel as nice and I like the writing on the cards in the colours and arrangement that I want, and the technology is more work to do that. For example, my Chinese vocabulary cards use multiple colours for various aspects of the pinyin and characters, including the memory palace location (always in green) with meaning of components in purple, grammatical notes in red, front and back of the cards in Chinese and English ā¦
I use 5 colours of erasable pens (Pilot Frixion Ball Erasable Gel Pens) almost exclusively. My handwriting is neat and I am fanatical about that, so erase anything that isnāt neat enough. That very act slows me down and forces concentration. Plus I use five colours of their erasable highlighters.
They look so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing them with us. Do you write your memory stations in your notebooks for each word? Does the number 44 represent this station?
Iām also experimenting with carrying around a similar A6 notebook at the moment ā 5mm but with dots. The pages are small, so Iāve been leaning towards 0.05mm fineliners and 0.38mm gel pens. I like the thin lines, but the ink isnāt erasable.
I only have one Frixion pen in black, but Iām going to take another look at it.
Do you prefer a specific brand of notebook?
Edit: after more experimentation, I switched to 7mm spacing. Iāll write more details at some point.
I love my little books. It is an emotional as well as cognitive attachment. The 44 is the location for all these words. They all belong to the āradicalā which is the basis for these characters - itās highlighted in green at the top right of the page. Stories link the meaning and the components which make up the character. Once the character and meaning are familiar, I donāt need the stories and more and donāt tend to think of the palace. But they are always in place if I need them.
So pleased to hear it. I have a few with dots not lines and like them too. I would prefer finer pens, but the stationary shop just down the road doesnāt keep them, and I like buying from them.
I donāt have a specific brand of notebook, although there are a few that I avoid now - they are in the box and have lovely covers and fall to bits very quickly. I am transferring the contents to better quality books.
I am taking bookbinding lessons! I am making my own books - mostly because I want to learn bookbinding for some new āart for memory sakeā experiments and partly just because I want to. So all my practice A6 handmade books are going to end up in this collection.
I really feel the tactile experience of handwritten things has a strong impact - but I am not sure if that is just me. I am also learning calligraphy for my new direction into mnemonic arts.
Sounds great. I recently got a couple of calligraphy books like World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy, and started learning Spencerian script with this workbook set (baby steps). Iām trying to see how quickly I can improve my handwriting and notes. They are readable, but I donāt like looking at them.
Iād be interested to see how your bookbinding turns out.
I decided to buy my notebook from thrift store as second hand. My goal is to challenge myself always with something different that already had a life.
For pen I use only a 4 color bic so I can use different color with only one pen. I also love the feeling of it. I have them everywhere as I loose them all the time.
For the notes I like to experiment so no technology and transfer everything into paper before I learn it. Also I decided my notes are temporary. My goal is when its in my memory the page can be throwed. I want my brain to know there no safety net
One thing I like is to create little box which represent 5 locie of a palace then create the palace. I then do a bunch of them in multiple page. Then somewhere else I put what I want to memorize and which page is the memory palace I use like āPAO: Someplace p46, another place P52ā.
Love all your ideas - but it is the comment about loving the feel of it which rings so true for me. I love the feel of certain pens and pencils, and certain paper. I just donāt get that from technology - much as I love technology in some situations.
If you take the thread down this path, you wonāt shut me up!
I am not writing any more books now, but moving into practicing ideas Iāve had for a long time about using calligraphy to aid mnemonics - as they did in Medieval times and in other cultures, especially Chinese and Japanese.
I have the World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy and lots of other calligraphy books and have done some classes. And I absolutely love using nibs and ink and watching the wet ink flow and dry. I confess to have overspent on nibs, inks, papers, books ā¦ a new addiction. I have done classes in copperplate, gothic and Roman scripts.
I am converting one of my memory palaces into an art travel journal which will be in a handmade book, and then filmed to share online. It is to memorise the geological time scale. I have designed fancy letters. For the Eons, there is an E on the words, such as Hadean. For the periods, there are full stops between each letter, such as C.a.m.b.r.i.a.n. And so on. The visuals work really well for me, but I havenāt done them properly yet. Then the travel journal has all sorts of mnemonics about the eon / era / period / epoch as I travel through time. I am trying to incorporate as much as I can of memory clues I have learnt. It will take me ages, but I donāt care. I am loving it.
I am also developing ideas to use the scroll format, as with Chinese and Japanese narrative scrolls, into contemporary story mnemonics. My bookbinding teacher hasnāt worked out how weāll bind these yet, but weāre going to have fun trying.
I think the handheld, handwritten format really allows so much more creative thinking and fun with memory palaces and other mnemonic formats.
I had the rule of having only 5 locie per room to not loose track of them. It was painful to create memory palace. Now doing this it seems it help my brain cut the palace into smaller piece also help doing them by batch.
Donāt get me started on my Bic !!! Itās like the perfect pen !!! We can do so much with it like 4 colors. I love the sound of clicking I think.
Right now my favourite pencil is the Steadtler norica 132 46 HB 2. It writes smooth, but isnāt quite silky, so you get some tactile feedback and that pencil scritchascratcha sound.
They promise to be durable, and they live up to it. Iāve used a razor to expose over an inch of lead, nicked it, dropped it more than once and it was still fine.
Love it! Iāll check out that pencil. Iāve started a project that is all in pencil. Mostly I am using the palomino blackwing pencils, but need a good HB. I am still using the ordinary ones. This sounds perfect.
how do you memorise the character-drawing? do you start out by using the major system (in essence: coƶrdinate dot 1up 3 wide etc.? then moving on to a single image?)
and how do you memorise the pronunciation? do you use rebus-alliteration-per-syllable-then-picking one image for whole?
I admit to being a bit nervous for that comparison. Locally those Staedtler pencils come in a 12 pack for $0.30 to $0.35 Canadian / pencil, and I would pit them against a Faber-Castell from the art store for $2.50ish (might be permanently on sale for $1.25) any day.
Blackwings are outside of my price range and Iāve never seen one in person. Would need to get them online for $55 / 12 pack, or $24 for just 3.
The blackwings have a strong vested interest in consistency, while Staedtler is known to vary in quality from year to year. A 2024 batch might not match my 2021 batch.
