Writing By Hand

So  sometime during the last semester, a study came out demonstrating that taking notes by hand (i.e., writing) helps students retain more information than typing notes on their keyboard.  I posted that to both my undergrad and graduate class online pages.  But it ended  up sparking a discussion a few weeks later in my grad class when one of my students shared that she was getting SO MUCH MORE out of the readings of a very difficult course by writing her notes instead  of typing them.  And later in the semester, she and I had a research meeting in which she had brought in her handwritten notes to an article I had annotated online (through Mendeley) and her insights into the paper were remarkable.  This was a paper, I’d read and cited several times, but she  was able to get something new out it.

WOWZA.

So I’ve started writing by hand my notes from articles again, my notes in meetings, my to do lists.  I’m printing off my students’ papers and reading them and writing on them.  Bless their poor little hearts because my writing mimics that of an MD, not a PhD.

I feel like I have gone back to the future.  But  I also feel like I’m getting a great deal more  out of my work.  I wrote everything by hand in grad school.  (Back in the stone ages)  I finally felt like I was getting  with the program when I typed my first draft on the computer.  I always did my serious editing by writing.  But I’ve been trying to even stop that.

No longer though.  I’ll Mendeley for storage  of the documents I read and also for their in text citing.  But I’m going  back to note cards  for my notes.  And  I will ride my horse and buggy to campus.  I notice a difference.  It could be that I’m an old f@rt and so that works for me.  Or  it may be that  all those  multiple  cues of  touch and movement encode these thoughts deeper.

I’d  love to  hear what you do.