Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

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Anecdotal info for myself - I learn by far most efficiently when I write on paper. Here's an interesting quote from "How to learn mathematics - The asterisk method"[0] around that:

> Copying material by hand is important because this forces the ideas to go through the mind. The mind is on the path between the eyes and the hands. So when you copy something, it must go through your mind!

For me this is definitely true. Maybe it's like that because when I was growing up we still didn't have smartphones, tablets and widespread computer use at schools and everything was written on paper with a pen/pencil. Most children and young people today probably don't use such tools as much as we did? With that said, I do believe there's something very real in the tactile and spatial feeling of writing on paper that does help learning and greatly improves memorising information. For myself it is definitely true. Maybe for a child today that would be an alien feeling? No idea. I'd be curious to read an actual research on something like this.

[0]:http://www.geometry.org/tex/conc/mathlearn.html

That quote doesn't quite explain the difference between writing and typing. Both use your hands after all.

What probably makes the most difference between the two is thinking about what you are writing. No matter how. Typing is likely to have the same effect provided you're not simply blindly copying stuff.

A more powerful effect that you hint at is the fact that writing by hand transfers the information to a physical location. You remove a layer of abstraction between your memory and what you've written down (yes we try to tie virtual stuff to a 'location' as well, but quite a lot of problems can be explained by people struggling with that abstraction).

> That quote doesn't quite explain the difference between writing and typing. Both use your hands after all.

True. Although the article is about writing on paper. I'm a pretty good touch typist and years of Vim have made me efficient with the keyboard. My typing is much faster than my writing. I'd say that even if I am thinking deeply about a subject, if I'm copying the text via typing, it I'll be a lot faster than writing. On the other hand writing gives me the opportunity to slow down. Maybe you're right that both should work equally if I'm invested mentally in the material, but then I'll have the internal pressure to type faster which might hurt that. As a physical motion typing is rather static when compared to writing, so I do believe an actual difference exists.

The speed difference between the two has been a point of friction for me in a couple of different scenarios.

It was something of a problem in university. While I’m not a particularly slow writer, I’m not a fast one either and as such it was often a struggle to keep up with what the professor was saying and putting up on the chalkboard when taking notes. Trying to summarize and write succinctly helped some but I’d still sometimes end up far enough behind that I ran out of mental “buffer” to summarize in which would lead to rote copying, making things even worse. All in all I regret not picking up a laptop of some kind for those years, because even 15 years ago I was much faster at typing.

These days when I write notes for studying the slowness isn’t an active problem, but more of a persistent irritation stemming from how much time is being spent that could be going elsewhere instead. This may just be an artifact of not writing often enough though.

I think if I was to do another university course, I'd just point a camera at the prof/white board for whatever they're talking about/writing, and then write down a much smaller set of things I'm interpreting for what they're talking about.

Quickly retyping/rewriting what they're saying never got me any benefit, though that was mech eng courses where nothing the lecturer says matters at all compared to practicing the math.

I've had success in a lecture situation by printing the slides beforehand with huge ass margins and then taking notes on said margins while the prof was talking.

That does require the lecture to have slides that are given to the students before the lecture though...

Typing doesn't have haptic feedback for a lot of things.

There's a feeling to drawing a really thick box circle around some text

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