A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them. Destroy the spine so it’s easier to read, fold pages, write the important stuff inside the front cover of the book. Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates.
Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding.
Don’t get caught up trying to figure out the right notation or highlighter color for a line. Just mark them up and later it’ll make sense.
Edit: I think the broader point that some of you may be missing is that I’m not prescribing a particular form of notetaking. I’m saying that reading is made more rewarding with active engagement. How you best engage is up to you.
I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture.
"Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick.
It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you want to write notes, get a notebook, which gives you space to write real thoughts down. I use a trapper-keeper.
it was funny seeing this right below the comment saying "I _love_ buying a used book and finding a previous reader's notes in the margins. It's the greatest.".
different strokes. if you want to ensure you don't get sick from a line being crossed out, buy new.
I have a book (not authored by Edison) that Thomas Edison scribbled his comments in the margin and I was quite happy to read them! Changing my own nearly-religious belief to never write in a book,I found that it totally changed my experience with the book and the author. There are thousands of copies of any particular modern book and it's no longer my task to preserve that unique copy for after the apocalypse. I would like to imagine my children one day being able to see their father's thoughts and dialogue with authors.
This is so condescending. The reason I buy used is that the overwhelming majority of books are out of print and not available digitally. Which makes the vandalism especially egregious!
Your argument is that in order for you to have a better experience the previous owner should not “ruin” the book for you. I’ve read better arguments on bathroom stalls.
No, my argument is that it's totally obnoxious to lend or resell a book that you've written in, and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with. It is precisely what Socrates warned us about.
I'd say this is a problem with the seller's communication, not the use of the book. If the seller didn't specify that the book was marked up, I agree with your sentiment. The act of writing in a book and selling it isn't the issue, but setting false expectations to whoever you're selling it to is.
> and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with
Are we really going to speak down to how someone uses a bunch of paper bound together? That's how they wanted to use it, which is cool, it's just not how you like it.
Aside from shallow, uncritical notes, consider that annotating in a margin is evidence that a reader is actively engaging with a text.
Very often when I write in margins it's to question or argue against what's written (e.g. "really? what about ...", or "no, contradicts ...") which, to me, seems in line with the dialectic process Socrates promoted. Multiple sides, truth-seeking.
Sure, having a spacious notebook on the side is even better. But it's the same goal, isn't it? Engage more deeply with a text and encourage questioning as you read it, while it's still fresh.
The first time I read "this sentence is false" it was scrawled in a bathroom stall in the philosophy department. Seemed appropriate. Left me wondering how many other people had also sat there pondering it for a few moments, certainly more than that had called that number for a good time.
I would expect them to be in the condition they were graded as. I'll avoid poor or fair condition books that have lots of marking in them. Good books that have minimal marking should be fine to me.
You can totally mark up your books. No issue with that, if you like it. I don't personally, but I don't see why someone shouldn't do it. Now should you sell those books? Probably not.
I used to go to a shop in a student area and pick up old Norton's Anthologies. Many of the notes were unintentionally funny. Some are occasionally insightful.
As I say elsewhere, it depends on the edition or book, and how common they are.
I _love_ buying a used book and finding a previous reader's notes in the margins. It's the greatest.
A tiny glimpse into a stranger's thinking as they processed the same pages I just did.
Thoughts they may never have shared anywhere else, that may not have made sense to anyone anywhere else. A secret code only for people who just read the last few pages. Shockingly intimate.
I once borrowed a technical book from my school library, and the previous owner who donated that book in the 90s circled the phrase "proof is left to the readers" commonly found grad math book and wrote a big "W.T.F?". It made me laugh so much hha
Nothing quite the same as making scientific conjectures in your marginalia or jotting down ideas in books and then having strangers find them and reinterpret them their own way.
These were fun to find in college bookstores every semester. Not a fan of "highlight it all" but the occasional enlightened soul with a scientific bent.
Highest possible recommendation for its thoughtful, intelligent, entirely human, poetic writing about various interconnected topics. Maria Popova is a treasure.
> Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates.
> Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding
This is actually the biggest reason I own a Remarkable 2/Kindle Scribe, let's me "destroy" the book while also not having to worry about losing my notes.
Honest question: How confident are you that you'll have access to those notes on your Remarkable/Kindle 20 years from now?
I love my Kobo. I highlight stuff with it. But for anything really important, I then go to my computer, go through each highlight, and make notes in my org file.
(I probably should automate it - I know tools exist to extract all that metadata from the Kobo).
> This is actually the biggest reason I own a Remarkable 2/Kindle Scribe, let's me "destroy" the book while also not having to worry about losing my notes.
Well... I'm mostly back to paper after losing most of the notes I had taken on my own Remarkable 2.
Totally agreed. I've never understood why people are so opposed to marginal annotations - it's part of why the book format succeeded as a technology! (i.e you can't marginally annotate a clay tablet). Incidentally, I always loved how Tolkien's maps had these pointing hands to indicate significant bits, and only after reading a lot of old manuscripts and incunabula in grad school did I realize that he was copying the favorite annotation of medieval writers, the manicule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
For many, the act of note taking, highlighting and marking up enhances the value of the reading. Revisiting is secondary.
This is eminently true for me. I rarely revisit notes, but if I take notes I have a much better recall and understanding than if I just consume the content.
> A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them
I do all that, all the time these days... :-) I thoroughly enjoy it! Sometimes I feel like having discussions (disagreeing or agreeing) with the author and will write entire pro/cons examples and/or arguments.
Exactly.
Personally, I gravitate toward book and topic-specific notes and highlights in the book itself and use the notebook for bigger-picture things for which book references play some role. I do a lot of highlighting in ebooks and lately I've started using LogSeq. I'll pull quotes from books into LogSeq and then tag them with whatever #bigger-picture topic I deem relevant, mimicking what I do on paper.
Do you have tips to start using notebooks instead of marking books? I personally like to underline stuff in my books, when I start a new novel it's often people, places and events. I'm not sure what would be the notebook equivalent of that. Writing down what I would underline? It seems tedious and you loose context and the sense of proximity between words.
For my textbooks, I use little record cards. I write the book reference on the top line, then whatever notes or quotations etc. If it's a heavily referred to book, I sometimes use different colour cards to mean different things.
When I return the book to the library etc., I take all my record cards out and put them in a little perspex index box.
Sometimes I use the record cards to then start some more detailed notes in a notebook; sometimes the record cards refer to a page in my notebooks where I've attempted a derivation etc.
"Write by hand and mark up your books" is excellent advice... that I no longer follow.
Marking up books didn't come naturally to me, but I did it for a while. Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral. The illusion of permanence must be confronted and reckoned with.
But for the last 15-20 years, I have been taking notes in text files that are saved to version control, which I find suits me better.
* Notes are not space-constrained by the space of the page margins, nor by the initial form they take on the paper page.
* Notes can be revised at will without requiring complete duplication to maintain optimal appearance and organization. There is no reason to resist revising notes — the history is completely preserved in old versions, so nothing will ever be destroyed even if deleted. Even though those old versions will almost certainly never be revisited, knowing that they exist frees the mind.
* I can indulge my perfectionism and write math notes in LaTeX, music notes in Lilypond, diagrams using SVG... The act of typesetting is itself a form of active engagement the source material, although it does not have all the advantages of hand-copying and can be time-consuming.
* Digital notes take up no physical space, compatible with a minimalist lifestyle. They can expand infinitely without needing to be stored or carted around.
* Digital notes don't need to be defended against physical threats such as fire, flood, or vermin. However digital notes still require precautions to preserve them in the form of a backup regime, so this is something of a wash.
* Ultimately, I don't expect anyone but me to be interested in my notes, and I don't owe anyone my notes. When I'm gone, the notes will vanish into nothingness — and since they are not constrained by being part of a legacy for heirs to pick through, they can take whatever form suits me best during my life.
I think the main point being conveyed is that writing by hand improves recollection. Whether it comes naturally or not, or whether it is a better system or not, of course is subjective. However there is truth in the notion.
When I draw something I can remember the shapes better than if I simply sit there and stare at it. Something with the hand-eye coordination triggers the brain into remembering.
Typing in contrast, one is not tracing the shapes of the letters (the thing to remember), but pushing buttons that are not physically related.
It’s the same thing as if you can touch and hold an object it becomes much more real than if you can see it in a picture or on a screen. Remembering is connected better to touch.
Yes, writing by hand is an experience that offers unique benefits. The physical act helps to consolidate and integrate knowledge — improving recollection is one benefit, although I'd emphasize improving intuition as more valuable.
The primary activity of note-taking is forming words and grappling with ideas, though — it's not like all benefits are lost when using a keyboard. To a certain extent other activities like typesetting achieve similar ends.
My brother writes novels longhand, and I've thought hard about this topic. Ultimately, certain personality quirks held me back and I never felt carefree when hand-writing notes. Version control liberated me.
I was once telling a friend about a book I had just finished. They were curious about it and asked me to borrow it. I politely accepted knowing very well they could never read my copy for it was embarrassingly covered in the messy marks I had enjoyed making during my read. Fortunately neither of us ever brought the subject again and I now think twice before messing up my books!
Michael Stevens (of Vsause fame) copies long quotes into notebooks, and he claims the act of writing it helps him remember. And if it's not worth writing, it's not a good enough quote.
I need to remember that this is okay. I didn't do it because of concerns about resale value... but recently I sold books for the first time in a while and got so little money that I realize this is not worth worrying about.
My grandad had a big library of books, but in his obsession of preservation, he wrapped all of their covers in gift wrap paper. It kind of defeated the purpose of having so many books in a library. You weren't able to browse them easily. I should go dive into them to take some some.
In middle school we had to make covers for all our textbooks on the first day of school (it was a school requirement, I guess to get a bit more lifespan out of the books). We used brown paper from old grocery bags.
Of course a lot of kids would then personalize their books with artwork and stickers. I guess it was that generation's equivalent of covering a laptop with stickers.
I did the same but had forgotten all about it until just now. I still put all the random stickers that accumulate throughout the year on my journal, it's a fun visual reminder of entirely random little things that happened during the year.
Marginalia is the best! I have a handwritten note about Ayn Rand in my 27 year old copy of Enchridion, a great reminder that she is like chicken pox, better catch her as early as possible. And several books such as I Claudius held together with duct tape. And soy sauce stains in Gargantua and Pantagruel from the place my grad school gf worked. Those count.
A bit of irony, going through old stuff I found a copy of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line on top of handwritten running logs from sr yr of college. In that book, there was a ticket stub from the time I was 86ed from an amusement park. (I did not eat enough after training that morning.) I was escorted on a golf cart back to our car where I finished Neal's now charmingly quaint essay with the plastic handle listening to Nirvana.
This was August 2001 and Mac OS X had barely come out. Maybe AI rhymes where Chinese free open-models clean up but someone proprietary figures it out. Which is sad as someone dominant in the ecosystem right now is the equivalent of Gary Kildall.
+1 I have read most of Rand's works. She grew up in the Soviet Union and hated collectivism and carried it very much too far. Still I find value in her work, and if she were here today I would bet $100 that she would disapprove of the current administration.
If I'm really studying a book I'll have an office supply store cut the spine out and make the book spiral bound. It's pretty cheap to do it too, like $10 or something.
I recently overcame this as I've been reading more of the unread books populating my shelves. I always wanted to keep my books in pristine condition and never wanted to mark them up. Now, I realize they are part of MY collection and marking them up with highlights, underlines, notes, etc., only make them more valued since they contain their intrinsic knowledge from the author as well as my own views. Even if I want to give them to friends to read, they'll see areas that jumped out to me and maybe appreciate some of the additional context or focus I noted as well.
Aside from my college books, I rarely marked any physical books up. When I went to ebooks on tablets from hardcopy, briefly, I got into notes and whatnot with MoonReader for a couple years (like 2013-2015). Don't see any point in it now. Mostly just questions, and always about non-fiction.
What's annoying are people who want other people to find their notes in books (and even sell them for the ego aspect).
> A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up!
Not library books though.
Every so often I get one with stuff underlined with pen or highlighter, and it's one of things that really makes me angry. (Lightly in pencil I'm okay with.)
I don't mean this with any disrespect, but people love to find ways to overcomplicate things that work perfectly well. And maybe for some reason that overcomplicated version works better, but for many it's at best a waste of time, at worst an active distraction from the thing your trying to do.
Agreed. The important thing is to find something that works perfectly for you. Oftentimes I think people find their own perfect system and conflate it with being the perfect system.
Eep, I guess it depends on what kind of learner you are. For me, the notes being in the book, and the book being somewhere on my shelf spatially encodes it into my mind.
Offloading things into a centralized store according to a system not only causes me anxiety but it doesn’t have the same spatial kick.
I agree with the spatial memory and the many possible and valid ways to approach reading and learning. But it's much harder to recall, connect and leverage ideas that way
I used to take notes on loose sheets of paper, fold them, and stuff them into the book between pages. I guess there are lots of ways to build a system.
A few books I've taken enough notes to collect them in a folder. I put section tabs in the book and tabbed dividers into the folder with matching colors. I note the page numbers for each note. Then I shelve that folder to the right of the book it was noting.
not as much as I used to but I still take handwritten notes when reading something I deem worth doing so by some personal semi-rational algorithm. my favorite exercise ~15 years ago was reading People's History of the US and Kissinger's Diplomacy at the same time, and taking notes in the same notebook in parallel columns. Naturally I went into product
I use a folded computer paper as a book mark and take notes on that with a page number for reference. It preserves the book and makes it easier to find what I want.
I buy paperbacks, chop and scan them [1] then use a reMarkable tablet + RCU [2] to do the reading.
Digitizing paper books and writing on them with digital ink is 100% the best way to have marginalia. I've tried special dotcode pens, portable scanners...writing digitally with a stylus is the best. Yes, it destroys the paper book, but it more than makes up for it with the freedom, flexibility, and durability of the digital copy.
Depends on the edition. I lent a book years ago to someone that was destroyed by damp on a window sill. I've never been able to get another copy of it.
A less rare book in a mass market edition would be another thing.
> Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates.
I hate it when people do this. Please don't. If you must, do it sparingly and for the love of all that's good please do not cross out words or sentences.
The only thing I can forgive is people who quote a particular paragraph they liked about the book in one of the first pages where there's enough blank space. It's a personal touch that doesn't taint the rest of the book.
Some mark that this belonged to someone, maybe from decades ago, can be charming; but please, do not ruin the book for me by scribbling all over it.
I always assume someone will inherit my books, either when I die, or because I gave them away as gifts or exchanged them for other books at a used books shop.
This is my stance by default, but let's say there's a book I love which I never intend to part with, even then I would feel bad about crossing words out. After all, if I love the book, what's this "violent" disagreement/scribbling about?
> But please, do not ruin the book for me by scribbling all over it.
How would someone writing in their copy of a book impact your ability to enjoy your own copy? Relax, it's their property and it's not criminal, so let them do what they want instead of trying to dictate rules.
Because I inherited the copy, maybe as a gift or bought at a used books shop? It's obvious from context I'm speaking of books that ended up with me, otherwise how would I even know they scribbled all over them?
> Because I inherited the copy, maybe as a gift or bought at a used books shop?
If it's from a book shop, you can thumb through it and choose to not buy it. If it's inherited or a gift, then what's the harm? Just discard it if it's been "ruined" or shelve it if there's some sentimental reason to keep it, and get a clean copy to read.
> It's obvious from context I'm speaking of books that ended up with me,
I doubt any of my books will end up with you nor will the books of the vast majority of HN readers and commenters, so why should any of us care about your peculiarities and avoid doing something that works for us and that we want to do?
> If it's from a book shop, you can thumb through it and choose to not buy it. If it's inherited or a gift, then what's the harm? Just discard it if it's been "ruined" or shelve it if there's some sentimental reason to keep it, and get a clean copy to read.
Sometimes you can thumb through and discover flaws, sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you can get that exact edition in better conditions, sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you buy a lot of used books, and cannot check every one of them. It's always a disappointment to find a book with pages all scribbled over.
> I doubt any of my books will end up with you
You're being too literal here.
If you don't care about my "peculiarities", just don't engage with me. Someone mentioned their attitude towards scribbling, and I cared enough to offer a counterargument on why I dislike it. Feel free to sit this one out.
I've always been pretty skeptical of the data which says handwriting is better for learning than typing. Yes, handwriting causes more brain activity, but just because your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!
For example, if I asked you to code FizzBuzz while riding a unicycle, I'm pretty sure you would show more brain activity than if you were just sitting at a desk. This does not mean it's an efficient way to program, nor that coding on a unicycle is better for learning.
I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
When I take notes when typing, I can transcribe the content word-for-word without knowing what I am hearing and without thinking about it.
When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.
I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.
Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.
> I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
If lots of people said they code better while riding a unicycle, I'm not sure I'd just dismiss it off hand.
Riding a unicycle and coding are not complementary activities - you are multitasking. Writing is aligning different parts of your brain to the same task, perhaps it is just creating additional focus.
There is no logical connection between moving a pencil to construct letterforms and deciding what you want to say. They have traditionally happened together, because before computers (or to some extent before typewriters) there was no better way to do one without the other.
This is how it was explained to me by a tutor: handwriting is better for learning because it's slower. The need for brevity forces you to mentally engage the material in ways that are more conducive to understanding and recall.
If you can replicate that mental engagement while typing, you'd probably get similar results.
This makes a lot of sense to me in light of what we know about how learning happens. I have never seen any research on brain activity though, and my tutor didn't cite any.
IME it's not just about slower. It's about forcing you to think about how words go together, where line breaks fall, how you're laying out bullet points, etc.
Since you can change all of this on computers (or it happens automatically), you don't have to give it thought before writing it down.
I've heard this theory too—but I feel it doesn't match how we do anything else in life. For example, you could make typing slower by forcing people to type with two fingers, or use a really tiny keyboard. Are touch typists worse at learning?
This doesn't really refute the theory—maybe touch typing is worse—but that doesn't match my logical intuition at all.
Wish I had a definitive answer. I do know from personal experience that when I'm touch typing notes while reading a book or listening to a lecture, my thoughts drift fairly often. (I'm a fairly fast touch typist though, 140+ w/m.) I'm also more likely to be thinking, "damn, that's a lot of notes!" rather than about the material, lol. Whereas while handwriting, I'm heavily engaged with the material, to the point where I often forget that I'm in the middle of taking notes.
Oh and because it's so easy to make quick edits while typing, I find it hard to resist the impulse to correct a typo or add an extra word here and there, which further distracts me from the material.
Also, I can touch type for long stretches without the slightest mental fatigue, but I need a tiny mental break after 30-60 seconds of handwriting.
>your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!
the thing it's doing when writing with your hand is fine motor control, one of the most important and distinguishing abilities that humans have.
I tutor in a makerspace and one thing I've observed it's that it's now easier to teach old people how to solder than younger kids, and that in my experience has never been the case before. Due to growing up on impoverished digital interfaces I see lack of dexterity that I've never seen in young people before. Same reason I suspect you see a decline in people picking up tactile musical instruments like the guitar or violin.
I agree that fine motor control is important, I just don't think forcing people (especially kids) to write by hand is necessarily the best way to do it. For example, if the kids went to your makerspace, they could learn fine motor control and probably enjoy themselves more.
Forcing people to handwrite both makes writing more laborious and takes away from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts. At minimum, when handwriting you can't go back and insert words or rearrange sentences to try out different ideas.
I do still think kids should learn how to write by hand, because it's culturally important. However, I think it could be emphasized somewhat less, and I don't think schools should teach cursive (which, anecdotally, I think is actually having a small resurgence in many schools).
It actually is difficult to find an exercise for developing fine motor control that is as complete and as cheap as practicing handwriting.
All other exercises would need more expensive tools and after inventing a sufficient number of different patterns for other activities, that would be practically equivalent with writing a different alphabet on another medium than paper, e.g. carving wood or stone, etc.
I did not like to use handwriting for things like taking notes at school or at the university, and I switched to typewriting as soon as I could afford a computer. For work purposes I now use only typewriting.
Despite this, I am very grateful that in the first years of school I was forced to practice handwriting, even if I have abandoned decades ago the style of handwriting that I was taught.
The reason is exactly what the previous poster has said, that this practice of handwriting as a child was essential for developing the motor control that I needed later as an electronics engineer for soldering or for assembling and disassembling various miniature devices.
>from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts
for one it's not clear to that this is what is actually important in writing or unrelated. That's just a bias in a culture that systematically neglects embodied practice.
In Japan there's an increasing phenomenon of Kanji-illiteracy among the young. Turns out there is a close connection between writing them out, the order of strokes and the physical activity and the memorizing of meaning of the Kanji, just passive observation or digital input can't replicate. There's a reason calligraphy is such an important tradition. There's an inherent connection from your hand, to your working memory to the processing of symbolic meaning.
This mirrors the discourse you see in math. "Rote memorization, writing equations, isn't important, you need to be able to think" turns out it really isn't and countries that teach traditionally excel at math. We live in an educational culture of thinking-pilled people who disregard the physical world and practice with abysmal results.
Speaking of ancient practices coming back into favor: Are other people thinking meditation would be useful as they wait for their LLM to finish?
I've incorporated back writing by hand some time ago but find as models get smarter and I throw more at them they have also been taking longer.
In these moments even a notebook can register as something of a distraction. I already aim to keep my phone far away but I'm curious about trying to commit to meditating between prompts. Part of me feels like it would be a little silly. But maybe not.
Doodling in a notebook feels preferable in these moments but also feels like a context switch when the agent is done. Then again perhaps I need to just refine my process so notebook planning can feel like it is working more in parallel with the LLM rather than us blocking each other...
I find his dismissal of iPad writing to be unconvincing. He talks about how we have calibrated our writing utensils over centuries to involve the proper amount of friction, and how that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing on an iPad.
That may be true, but it's not like you can't just re-acclimate to the experience of writing on an iPad. Most people don't handwrite much, period, so if they start handwriting again they're going to have to have an adjustment period either way.
I personally would think that the the benefits of digital writing (searchability, portability, infinite canvas, handwriting cleanup, digitization) would outweigh his friction quibbles. I personally don't find it to be tiring to write on an iPad, even without a screen protector (which some people use to increase friction). Also, e-paper devices tend to have more friction-y feedback, but he doesn't address this at all when dismissing all "gadgets" outright.
The study he cites is also specifically using digital pens
> Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard
kinda funny.
It's also not clear from this study that there is actually any benefit to "more brain activity". Of course doing more complex motor tasks requires more brain activity but nobody guarantees that this helps with remembering things.
My issue with the iPad is that it just does not have the fine-fidelity or response time of real ink, and it's not something that never fails.
It's so frustrating to be so pregnant with an idea, to open ones iPad, and to find out the battery is low, Procreate isn't working, the Notes app is confusing to navigate, oh no you're writing but your palm has slid on the screen, etc.
I've spent a lot of time searching for a digital alternative, but IMO we're at least a decade away from digital handwriting being even close to on-par with paper, even ignoring friction and feel.
I do find the iPad battery drain to be annoying and inexplicable. When they first came out, iPads held a charge for weeks in standby. New ones drain in a few days, even when background app activity and such are disabled. And you're right that it is frustrating to pick up your iPad and discover that the battery is near-dead, which happens with surprising frequency.
That critique doesn't apply to Remarkables or Kindle Scribes though.
I have a "paper-feel" screen protector and a metal nib on my Apple pencil. The combination provides a comfortable amount of friction for me, and the fact that it's matte cuts down on reflections.
Friction is also variable, with pen and paper type. Although the iPad is a bit too slick, it gets very fatiguing (I did most of my HW in college on the iPad)
It may be the case that the iPad is slicker than ideal for some people, but even if that's the case it doesn't relate to his point about centuries of adaptation or whatever. In the past, we were limited by the laws of physics and the materials available in our environment. If people could have had whiteboards 200 years ago instead of chalkboards, they would have taken them (easier to erase, no chalk dust). But they didn't have them, so they didn't use them.
iPad is terrible for hand-writing. It's (relatively) heavy, so you can't hold it and write on it. It's slippery, and the friction between the pen and stylus is bad.
The stroke size is highly customizable. What do you mean "the friction between the pen and stylus is bad"? As others have pointed out, you can get screen protectors and nibs for Apple pencils.
Always found that writing stuff down helps me to remember things better, whether studying something, prepping for an exam, or in general. Didn't even matter if I didn't look at those notes again, it just got "stored" better.
Didn't know he is a lefty too! Fountain pens + lefty is a tough combo; we had to use fountain pens in the 1st grade and my wrist was always stained on the side. Agree with the rollerball angle, Pilot V5 is my go to now...
I noticed this as well and the question caused me to go pretty deep into writing in general.
Switched to a 36 key ergo split with a tweaked alpha-thumb layout (R is on my left thumb, Space is on the right, base layout is Hands Down Vibranium V). Started learning Pitman shorthand (again) then switched to Noory Simplex and stuck with it. Became fascinated with Zaner's Method of cursive where the writing is done entirely through arm movement and using the rhythm of the muscle movement instead of by conscious control over the pen position. At the moment I can write at about 100wpm on a keyboard, 70wpm in shorthand, and 26wpm longhand.
I believe that the improved ability to learn comes from the need to focus on a concept for longer while writing and not on the motion of the writing itself. My ability to retain is better in cursive than in shorthand and I don't notice a significant difference in retention between keyboard and shorthand.
Actually, paper orientation was a big help too. Used to tilt the sheet so you write almost bottom-to-top, that way you at least don't smuge the writing right away, and hopefully the ink dries quick enough for the next line
Wow, I can't believe Neal Stephenson of all people writes exclusively by hand. His books are tomes.
I totally buy that this is the case for him. I wonder how much is just what he's used to vs what's actually better. I feel like I write so slow compared to how fast I type that I struggle to put the words together on the paper. I can spurt out something with a keyboard 10x as fast, and then re-review and re-organize and all that.
Knowing that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes his prose can read like a sentence that was started but he’s too much effort in to give up on. It probably helps his writing to do it by hand - you can’t edit quickly on the fly with paper (unless you’re cutting stuff out). I could see this as being part of his process - just write and let the editing happen later.
Whatever the process it is, long as his books may be, it works.
This actually explains why I've never been able to get into his writing despite rave reviews and countless recommendations by people I know. Something about his writing always just felt tedious to me. Im an avid reader btw.
His earlier stuff was much better. If you tried Snow Crash or Diamond Age and didn't like them, he's not the author for you, but if you tried his more recent crap like Anathem I would strongly advise you not to judge him based on it.
Give his earlier works a try and you may find he used to be able to write well (ie. he used to actually edit his work), before he stopped caring and just wrote 1000 pages of unfiltered garbage.
I wonder if fiction writing at that level is like coding. You can learn to type and navigate really fast, but unless you're working on blub software, if you're doing something interesting and novel, you won't actually get to the goal faster. The bottleneck is the ideas, the structure of the story and the development of the characters, amongst many other concerns.
I was cleaning my office a couple of days ago and found stacks upon stacks of paper. I've had a habit for over a decade of taking printer paper, folding it half length-wise, and scribbling notes on it as I work. I use it like a temporary scratch pad. It is an ingrained habit at this point, as soon as I have difficult focused work to do I reach for the paper and pen. Urgent site-wide outage? Start scribbling. Big feature decomposition? Start scribbling.
So I have this massive stack of notes that I glimpse at before shredding or whatever. Nothing of permanent value, nothing that I look at even 24 hours after it is written. But the sheer volume of the writing like that I do surprises me ever time I clean it out. It's like a novella sized stack of paper with server names, sketchy diagrams, peoples names, dates, commit hashes, debug messages. Lots and lots of lists. Things underlined, circled, stars, strike through, arrows, etc.
It is such an ingrained habit that its almost a compulsion, like someone is tying my hand behind my back if I don't have access. It is like my brain needs reassurance that some detail I just noticed won't be lost, at least it will be on the paper if I need it in the next 5 minutes. Like an extension of my short-term memory.
I have also kept a journal for 20+ years, mostly on paper. I often use a fountain pen (Lamy 2000) and notebooks with high-quality paper, but I am not super picky about it. I've used the cheapest school notebooks to the finest Japanese boutique papers. I'm a fan of the Pilot G2 and pens that have a similar feel. I'll also journal in Google Docs, Apple notes, or text docs in VS Code.
It is hard for me to disentangle the supposed benefits from the sheer weight of habit. It is just something I do, part of who I am.
I’ve recently gone back to writing by hand, at least for text that is of a reasonable length. The workflow that works for me is a third-party app on my iPad that converts my handwriting to digital text that I can then paste somewhere.
I’m sure, as the author says, it’s not as good as the real deal of writing with an actual pen, but I need it to be digital text eventually and don’t want to waste a lot of paper. I have found that I’m more creative and enjoy writing more.
I taught Gore Vidal how to use a computer in 1995. After a week worth of trying to use a PowerBook Duo, he went back to pen and paper. When asked how to improve my writing, he said use a pen and transcribe your favorite author. That I would eventually find the rhythm and style and make it my own.
i've actually had marketed to me on the socials a course on "transcribing" professional writers demonstrating various angles of the craft. I'm sure the course was vibed or something. Pretty easy to identify authors you like, and whose dialog snaps, whose descriptions you identify with, whose doing great character development, etc. And then transcribe them....
EDIT: maybe the term I was looking for is: copywork?
Very interesting. Hunter S. Thompson described the same technique for learning to write. I'll try it even if it only gets applied to technical blog posts...
That's really cool. I read Lincoln when I was around 18 and it has always stuck with me. The books you read become a part of you; they grow your view of the world. Books are the only way we have to capture the experience or mind of another person, and directly transfer not only their words but almost a sliver of the authors soul directly to others. Movies, sure.. But books hook into the imagination and mind.
I agree with this but for a different reason than what the author gives.
When you write in a notebook you can see where what you are writing is within the notebook (e.g. ~1/3 of the way through, etc). That seems like a small thing but I think it really helps with anchoring the memory when writing, as well as with referencing it later. And of course you can also add all sorts of tabs and page markers to help even more.
As a child I was diagnosed with a condition known as dysgraphia, which makes it difficult for me to make my hand write what my mind wants it to without straining myself. Typing doesn't seem to be as affected for me for some reason.
Sometimes I'll skip whole letters in a word without thinking and need to go back fill it in. Sometimes my baselines will drift as I write a sentence despite the paper _being lined_. Cursive is nearly impossible for me without extraordinary effort, despite me thinking it beautiful and wishing to improve my abilities there.
Dysgraphia for me makes it difficult to write for extended periods of time, and results in very poor handwriting. In fact, the reason I first got a computer as a little kid was so that I could type school assignments, and this was in elementary school in the 90s when everything was still handwritten where I grew up. I even typed my math homework with awkward notation in College (my professors hated me).
All of that said, I still find that I agree with the sentiment of this post, and I do keep notebook. It's laborious for me to write, but I still find that the intentionality and forethought that it demands produces (think about it, you're committing something immutable in the real world with ink and paper) something we're losing: deeper introspection. I know this might sound silly or pretentious like hipsters and vinyl records, but I think there's something in physical writing worth keeping despite its inconveniences.
I was filling notebooks too quickly and didn’t know what to do with them so I switched to a Kindle Scribe. It’s more expensive than a bunch of nice paper notebooks but it’s worked well for me. I export my handwritten notes for safe keeping and can have AI conversations with them as material. I also tried Kindle HD tablets, which worked just as well, but I got a lot of eye strain since I also work on a computer all day.
I always wrote by hand - probably because I spent over a decade in academia dealing with equations. I always have a pen in my pocket (without a pocket protector!)
About a decade ago I went back to writing with fountain pens after a nearly two decade hiatus. Oh, the joy!
But very sad he has no (real) tips on dealing with hand fatigue - other than to write in cursive. I always had hand fatigue for writing long stretches of prose - even back in my school days. A few years ago, I simply had to change how I grip the pen to reduce the pain, but I still can't write many pages without significant pain and the need for breaks. I can't imagine writing a whole novel that way.
Also, I wish he told us how he gets that handwritten stuff into digital form. Does he just mail handwritten stuff to the publishers?
In the past, I'd write twice: Once by hand, and then I'd type up anything worth saving to get it in digital form. A royal pain!
Then with Whisper and LLMs, life got a lot better. I would simply read what I'd handwritten, and get an LLM to clean it up. I only occasionally needed to fix it up after that.
Now LLMs are so good at it that I simply take a picture and send it to the LLM for transcribing.
I don't care how much people hate AI - for me it has quite literally reduced physical pain in my life.
The muscles in your hand and fingers are small and tire pretty easily. The muscles in your arm and shoulder are bigger and can do a lot more work. Back in the day, folks who were taught "business cursive" like the "Palmer Method" were taught to keep their hand mostly static, and to guide the pen strokes using their arm. The way I do it is by planting my forearm on the desk as a pivot point, and moving my arm and shoulder to make the pen move. It took some getting used to, but my handwriting looks about the same as it did before, but no more hand pain.
My first was the Pilot Metropolitan. Still a solid pen I recommend.
My next favorite was/is a PenBBS - perhaps the 309 - I don't have it on me at the moment. I replaced the nib with a Goulet nib, and somehow made it extremely smooth. I've not been able to make any other Goulet nib that smooth - somehow got lucky.
These days I'm heavily using a Platinum Plaisir which is also surprisingly smooth (no modifications).
Every time I've paid more than $50 for a pen, it hasn't been worth it. I can't get the ink in my Opus 88 pen to flow consistently. I'm sick of it.
I'm partial to Faber Castell nibs, but the pen I bought had a grip that I didn't like, and I don't want to spend the money to try their other pens.
I've always love stationery. Over the years I've looked up pen reviews and tried out many different types including fountain pens.
I watched a video recently from someone, from memory the creator behind the youtube channel vsauce. Very briefly, he lost some notes to water. His words, thoughts and ideas vanished. His solution was switching to pencil.
I'm addicted to people talking about pens and pencils. Adam Savage also has done a few videos on his favourite mechanical pencil.
Apparently Stephenson loves fountain pens and reluctantly gel pens. In general, those are water based inks and will wash away with water. There are one or two fountain pen inks designed to be more permanent and won't wash away with water.
Just something to keep in mind if you're currently writing or want to start.
I did some fade tests with several pens and a pencil on a laser print. The pencil and toner were the only things that hadn’t faded in direct sunlight after two years. Even high end pens faded.
To be fair, your notebook probably won’t get light like that, but pencils are pretty archival.
Interesting. I wonder if in 100 years time Stephenson's fountain pen writing will still be around. No doubt they are all scanned, but, maybe the originals will fade.
I saw another video about someone's favourite pen and he gave the reason as check fraud. Apparently the uniball 207 is pigment based ink and doesn't wash away in acetone.
I just searched then on youtube for acetone pen check fraud and it looks like there's a 13 year old video about it, and a million copycats. Either copycats are lazy, or the 207 is still $2 13 years later.
Don't underestimate the importance of a pen, ink, and paper you like. I found my pen a decade ago: Lamy Studio, in British Racing Green, with a medium nib. I found my ink not long after, from J Herbin's collection.
It wasn't until I got a nice notebook from Leuchtturm 1917, though, that the ensemble came together and I started looking for excuses to get my kit out and write things down. Since then, I've moved onto notebooks from de Kempen, but the point stands
A nice pen is... nice. But it's as easy to fall into geeking out about pens and paper as it is keyboards, knives and other kitchen utensils, tools, etc. In most cases, any pen is as good as any other. Or just find a cheap mass produced pen that feels good in your hand. They are plentiful. Then buy a stock of them.
I actually like using pencils, with a thick lead because I tend to have a pretty heavy hand when writing and I will continually break a thin lead.
I'd like to go back to writing with pen and paper, but my bad handwriting bothers me. So any time I start writing something, part of my concentration is wasted on trying to make it look good.
I like writing by hand, but I don’t agree with the logic that it’s good because it recruits more areas of the brain. The less effective the medium is, the more of the brain it will recruit; chiseling on a stone tablet is probably a more complex task and it probably gives a more broad stimulus to the brain, but it does not mean it’s such a good idea. I would personally prefer to use a text editor for effective writing and then crochet for fine motor skill.
Right, it's a false signal. It doesn't mean that more things are retained.
I think what happens in these types of threads is that the people who like handwritten notes, perhaps even obsessively so, all pour in. But that population of handwriting fans isn't necessarily representative of the population overall.
I don’t know about the brain but it’s good for the final results in my experience coding, writing and composing (orchestral music). The results are better and it takes less time if I start with pen and paper before “committing” to the computer. One of my favorite authors Jennifer Egan also writes fiction on paper (non-fiction articles still on the computer). More thoughts: https://www.phpied.com/starting-in-the-analog-domain/
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck? I have thought long and hard about this, and I have settled on taking notes by typing on my laptop. The benefits are far too many: I do not have to carry my notes around to read them on the commute; I do not have to worry about losing them; I can rewrite them to my heart’s content without messing up the layout; and I feel that I type faster than I can write.
I do partly agree, though. When I am studying a new concept or reviewing old ones, I tend to scribble my thoughts down. I have not been able to replicate brainstorming while scribbling and doodling on an electronic device. The friction of my pen on paper seems to actually wire the pathways in my brain.
That was a reccomendation from a philosophy professor I had in college. By the end of the semester, I didn't even have to review my notes.
I went back to school at 25, and that moment made me realize why school felt strangely more difficult, and then I remembered that we wrote down everything back then.
> I use a lot of moleskine notebooks and Mead comp books, which I can buy in bulk online.
Moleskine notebooks are beautiful, but I always felt they were far too expensive. Would love to learn where they can be bought in bulk for a more reasonable price.
I'm a convert to the idea of just having a cup full of Bic Cristal (cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, replaceable, 76 year old design) ball point pens. Whenever I temporarily misplace one, I just grab another from the cup as I find them. When I'm cleaning up, they all go back to the cup. However, his point about how hard you have to push to write is making me reconsider. On the other hand, I'm also not writing 42 inch high stacks of manuscripts like him.
I used to be a fan of Zebra Sarasa (retractable, not one of the variations) which I thought was better than the G2, but it wasn't always reliable (maybe they changed something), was more expensive, hard to find in stores (G2 are everywhere though), and accumulates a glob of ink when you draw a line across the page, which ends up wherever you next write something. I happen to have a G2 next to me so I'm testing it for the same problem now, and ended up with a glob somewhere along the long line. I cross things off of todo lists a lot or draw dividers between sections of the page so that happens all the time. Still, it might be a good compromise for the pressure issue for writing sentences.
Not that I'm that price sensitive, it is kind of nice: Sarasa ($2+ each, if you can find it), G2 (~1.25 each), Cristal ($0.10-$0.25 each)
That is why I call good pens like my Fink [1] a thinking tool. I always wonder if it is nature or nurture, but I am sure that writing helps me to think in a straight line.
And the long term studies will show that it’s indeed not good, people will discuss it, and nothing will really change, except that there will be a counter movement, and writing code by hand will become a real craft again.
We also know fast food, alcohol, etc., are bad for you and yet most people do these things. I wouldn't bet on LLM usage going down due to it anytime soon.
I thought the purpose of coding was to produce software, but apparently every action I take should be evaluated on how well it achieves arbitrary brain calisthenics.
Coding manually keeps you focused on irrelevant details. I find people that actually like that cognitive style and try to remain in it for as long as possible insanely unproductive. They'll spend years coding up shit that can be replaced in a month. I've seen it happen multiple times now and I'm getting sick of it. Proper problem decomposition and architecture is everything. Think about your problem domain. Code is just bullshit.
I'm dealing all day with developers incapable of thinking about anything else than "queries", "classes", "structs" and "early returns are bad". Semantics, ontologies, interfaces, abstraction boundaries, problem decomposition: ain't got no time for that.
We got structs to initialize, copy constructors to worry about and header definitions in bloody C++ to deal with! Oh look, you forgot to use Yoda-speak in your conditional, also you initialized two variables instead of one in this completely transient, temporary piece of code that is only run once every two months. Let's talk about this all morning! Because code hygiene is so extraordinarily important. You should definitely worry about each and every line of code. I hear it's "good for the brain".
I've always struggled with writing by hand primarily because I tend to over-tense my grip on a pencil/pen even with an ergonomic grip attached. I learned to touch type pretty early on, so back in school before they let us bring laptops to class I would sometimes "type" notes and imagine the text of them in my head as I typed. This still helped with my retention compared to just listening and making mental connections between the concepts being introduced. Sometimes I would type out the full detailed notes and then by hand write out tiny personal shorthand bullet points that would help me recall the general point.
To this day, if I'm trying to learn something new, I will sometimes "type" on an invisible keyboard if I don't have a pen/paper or a smartphone I can write down specifics on. It doesn't work as well for things like memorizing phone numbers or like support ticket ID numbers, but I've found it helps me ingest knowledge even if it doesn't help as much with raw information the way writing by hand does.
Now all of that said, I have also found, like Neal Stephenson, that a high quality, low friction pen on notebook paper tends to feel the best and produce the least cramping. To this day, when I absolutely need to take handwritten notes, I use a Sharpie Rollerball 0.5 black pen with a small notebook, primarily for D&D (and other TTRPG) prep-work, so that I can recall specifics off the top of my head better while improvising.
> you’re going to get tired faster if your muscles have to exert more force
I like to handwrite, but my right hand gets tired very fast, especially as I got older. I write almost a shorthand style, and it is hard to read, but I value speed of writing things down versus the neatness or readability afterward. The author recommends fountain pen or gel rollerball pen, which I have both tried.
Does anyone have any other advice for preventing fatigue? I've also tried to learn to use my left hand, so I can switch hand when my hand gets tired. But even after months (or years?) of trying, I could never get it to write, or atleast to my satisfaction.
Clench the other fist while writing. This loosens the writing hand. Something in the subconscious releases tension in the other hand. It's a trick I've used with reasonable success and it's immediately effective. It does require a bit of conscious effort, but overall it's a great hack.
If you're willing to try things like non-dominant hand writing, it may be worth learning something like business cursive. Most of the movement is done with your arm, and it was designed for people who had to handwrite all day for their job.
Other posters are providing advice about writing from the shoulder, and writing slower etc which I would agree with. The other thing I would mention is: how tightly do you grasp/hold the pen? Try relaxing the grasp a bit.
(I've noticed this with students I support. In the UK the public exams known as GCSEs and GCEs are written papers, and some adult students who need to take them have similar fatigue problems).
A liquid ink rollerball pen, for example the classic "uni-ball Vision Elite" is even closer to the effortless writing experience of a fountain pen (i.e. with a minimum pressure on the paper), than any gel pen (but gel pens are still much better than traditional ball-point pens, which require an excessive pressure on the paper; fountain pens and liquid-ink rollerball pens need to just touch the paper, almost no pressure needed).
Versus a fountain pen, a liquid-ink rollerball pen has the advantage of being insensitive to orientation (which may be difficult to control if you tire easily) and it is also much more unlikely to dry up when unused.
I do not write so much by hand as to become tired, so for myself I prefer a Japanese fountain pen with a nib that allows variable-width lines, for less boring letter forms, but if the criterion for choosing is the maximum possible comfort then I recommend a liquid-ink rollerball pen, and I have experimented with all kinds of writing implements known to mankind.
Except for using the most comfortable writing tool, there is nothing else to do besides changing the style in which you write, to simplify the hand movements.
Perhaps you should alternate between 2 different styles of handwriting, because they might stress different hand muscles.
I have no idea what style of handwriting you use, but I am not convinced that the kinds of "cursive" handwriting that were taught in many schools are really the least tiring, despite their emphasis on minimizing the number of times when the pen is raised from the paper. Many years ago I have abandoned the kind of writing that I was taught as a child and I have switched to one of the variants of the so-called "Italic" handwriting, which are now promoted in many places and which are a revival of the Aldine letters from the Italy of the 16th century, which have also been the base from which the so-called "Italic" style of the printed typefaces (fonts) had been developed. Such a handwriting has improved readability, but how fast and comfortable it is felt, can vary a lot between people. It works for me, but that does not mean that it would also be the best for others. There are books and on-line tutorials about this.
Perhaps you should just write slower, to avoid fatigue.
Don't hold the pen too tightly. Find a pen and paper combination that doesn't require force to write. Ball point pens on cheap notebook paper are notorious for requiring too much force. On quality paper with a good pen the ink will flow effortlessly because of gravity and capillary action. You will only need a light pressure.
I'm left handed and I never really learned a good grip I could write with. So I've always struggled with handwriting. I also have an essential tremor in my left hand. As I have aged, the tremor has gotten worse. So now, I have to grip tight to minimize the tremor.
I've pretty much given up on handwriting, it's embarrassing to either try to write, or have someone else write stuff for me. I ask my wife to fill stuff out for me all the time, but people probably think that's weird when they see it.
> when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.
I completely agree! Perhaps it's simply for one reason: slowness.
Writing by hand slows down and the brain "breathes", calms down, and the waves of thought flow at their proper pace.
We aren't made to rush always: by slowing down, our brain also has time to better process thoughts and information, one at a time, and each one is given the "time it deserves."
Our brain works best when it's relaxed and has time to make all its connections.
Thinking is, first and foremost, an exercise in slowness.
(ps: I'm also left-handed, I wonder if this also affects the functioning of the brain...).
This was my personal trick at the university. I was writing down all the notes during classes, even at the ugliest of my handwriting, but after classes insat down and rewrote the whole Notes in a better and clear way, so I was directly storing information in my brain.
I just needed to re-read the better notes 1 or 2 times and I could already recall the information, even at distance of time.
I buy nice notebooks and nice pens that are satisfying to use. I practice my handwriting, so the finished work is satisfying to look at. I think it gives me a bit of dopamine boost.
I'm curious about everyone's opinion on writing "by hand" with a stylus on tablets like the Remarkable, Kindle Scribe, iPad+Pencil, etc.
I like sketching and outlining with pencil and paper, but my handwritten notes are often illegible and disorganized. I know it's partly process and my poor penmanship, but digital surfaces compensate for this with built-in organization, searchability, and easier integration into projects and knowledge bases.
I tried for years to make handwriting on the iPad work, but it never clicked for me. I randomly encountered a reMarkable Paper Pro Move recently, instantly purchased it. For the first time in my life, I no longer tote a paper notebook with me. The software, simplicity, low-latency, form factor, writing feel, everything is absolutely perfect for me.
My handwriting is roughly legible on paper (but getting worse). It is the same on an iPad+pencil with a Paperlike screen cover. It was impossible to read on my Remarkable 2 - the resolution just isn’t there for me.
I think it’s important to have that friction between the stylus and the screen. And if you have that, I am pretty happy with notes on either my iPad or paper.
I found the Paperlike to be worse than the iPad screen alone, but I've been happy with the Astropad Rock Paper Pencil as it comes with a replacement tip for the Apple Pencil that has a metal tip and generates some noticeable friction.
I think tablet handwriting is fine. I had some six weeks of down time a while back and took advantage of it to go through the Getty-Dubay book Write Now: the Getty-Dubay Program for Handwriting Success to improve my handwriting legibility. There's a website now https://handwritingsuccess.com/ and for your purposes even more relevant, there's a mobile app. I'm not affiliated, in case you're wondering.
As for disorganization, that's kind of the nature of early notes.
There are ways to kind of organize them. One technique I use is writing them on notecards or notecard-sized paper, which I can later shuffle and organize.
I keep a handwritten journal and write in script. My penmanship isn't great, but it's good enough.
For exams in my intro programming classes, I allow students to bring a handwritten notes sheet if they wish. I get anything from a few sentences to a sheet so full of writing it almost looks gray. From what I can tell, students who really put effort into their notes sheet look at it less frequently but tend to score higher. This tracks with the studies I've seen on handwritten notes.
I hated paper until I found a decent pen (frixion erasable, mediocre) and paper (Lemome grid notebook, very good). It's still harder than typing, but I've found nothing better for thinking through challenging problems.
I still hand write a lot of code, and especially when starting out on projects or making more fundamental changes. I find it leads to better architectural solutions. My thinking has been that writing it out by hand can be slower so my brain is incentivized to think through the options and come up with more concise solutions. But maybe, as the article suggests, there are other small factors to hand-writing that lead to an improvement as well. I also use then go through the hand-written code to "execute" programs in my head and I think this also leads to higher-quality code. I encourage anyone that wants to be genuinely good at programming and software engineering to give it a try.
> Removing friction by using a hard stylus on glass will actually make the process more tiring.
Well since I've never written with a fountain pen, and the type of paper I write on with the fountain pen matters, I'm probably better off picking up the habit with an ipad or the like.
From the source paper:
> Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning
I would also be interested in whether the parts lighting up are actually contributing to learning the task at hand. The 2024 paper quoted above didn't mention a test for comprehension. The prior Stanford experiment also reasoned that writing helped with comprehension because students were forced to summarize.
I'd like to see an experiment that forces both groups, typing and writing, to summarize while their brains are scanned. I'd also like to see results from tests for comprehension for each group. I feel like that would make a stronger case for whether the benefit from writing is actually worth it.
For last few months, whenever I am trying to understand a difficult problem or a concept or addressing a complex issue at work or in relationships, I try to write one page by hand. Often it brings clarity or surfaces the core confusion/misunderstanding. I don't know why that works but it has been really useful.
It does feel like a post stating things that are obvious, were someone not blinded by technology.
Curious if others have noticed a trend of going back to "old school" methods, once there is research etc around it. Seems like you can have just not used the new flashy thing.
I wrote this reply by hand and then used by keyboard which is connected with my mac mini using Bluetooth to type it here so you guys can see it.
"I write all my notes and letters by hand and I started writing them like 2 months ago when I was researching on something and found out the benefits of writing by hand. My post went mega viral on X (@ihteshamali) you will see it here on X and it got like 120k likes and people really loved it. And most people said they will now turn back to writing by hand which is nice."
As some have noted, if you like writing by hand for all of the benefits listed in this article but also want a digital copy for search, taking a photo and having an LLM read your handwriting works really well.
To streamline this process I wrote an iOS app that does exactly this. I used it to digitize my handwritten diaries, but it works for any handwritten paper.
I am really trying to get everything digital. But I much prefer writing by hand, especially when doing math. I got Samsung s10+ and have 2 problems: the pen is too damn small and my handwriting sucks for recognition so it's mostly PDFs for now instead of fully digitized. Anyone have similar problems with solution?
"Writing by hand is good for your brain", but it does not say the habit or behavior can help you achieve some success, many achievements, especially the more significant ones need a complicated system and long-term hard work (remember 10000 hours theory?)
i'm not totally sold on writing prose by hand. it's still a little too uncomfortable for me. but, for doing mathematics or memorizing things, i have specific rituals built around handwriting that i finally figured out how to make work quite well. i have funny hard requirements though: a) clean, white printer sheets only, absolutely no lines, they are distracting b) mechanical pencils only c) a flat, hard, stable and clear writing surface is a must d) a real eraser must be available
my technique for memorizing things involves a handwritten spatiotemporal reproduction from memory (put everything in the same place on the page in the same order) with spaced repetition that exploits sleep cycles. took me forever to figure it out, but once i did things like exams that build on toolboxes of rote memorization became a lot easier!
i guess i should also mention that i have long had an interest in reproducing the causal nature of handwriting for composing text on the computer. things like write only editors that attempt to encourage that same sort of causal flow.
today I posted a show HN that got insta-flagged by an AI detector. I had written the post then gone back and forth with claude, getting to a refined version I thought was much better. claude said it would hit way better with hn (me?).
after getting flagged I found the original, reposted, and it is actually so much better. not polished, not a masterpiece, I'm nowhere close to a professional writer. But it's like a human story with the marks of human care.
i fear my brain's getting smoothed down by reading all the generation and I need to drop the AI crutch for a while, at least for copy/writing.
I hand write my notes so that I don't have to find them again when I need to remember them. I used to study the same way - just summarize everything I'm reading into hand written notes, maybe read them once more before the test if I had time, and pass the test. It's nice to see that my successful practice is now backed by research.
Does anyone here handwrite a blog? I've been thinking about doing that, but I'd be interested in how people accomplish it. Personally, I'd like this to be a hobby that gets me away from screens, so I'm looking to focus more on handwriting and minimize how much I'd need to interact with a digital device.
Not a blog, but I handwrite presentation slides sometimes. And, of course, pages of notes. I use my ReMarkable 2 for that, so it's pretty easy to import to desktop and run scripts.
I've done Julia Cameron's "morning pages" exercise off and on over the years, write three full pages of flow of consciousness by hand first thing in the morning, and it's shocking how good it is for unlocking ideas and working through problems when done consistently.
I have always found interesting that we thing as equivalent "different parts of the brain light up" and "good for the brain".
I say this as someone who has an tiny knowledge of neuroscience, but wouldn't you want sometimes to have low brain activity, for certain things?
Having the brain making more connexions and using more resources to do the same thing could be seen, from one point of view, as waste ?
Not that I disagree with the article, of course. Test results speak for themselves, but for example, when I am writing stories, do I need to "better remember" them, or do I need to go faster through my first draft ? (3 years and counting at the moment...wish me luck !)
> It might then seem reasonable to think that writing with a stylus on an iPad or similar would be best, since no force is needed and friction is minimized. I don’t think this is true. A small amount of friction is actually desirable.
I find digital handwriting quite pleasant and almost better than writing on paper. Friction is indeed an issue, but you can just buy a dedicated screen protector to address this problem.
Yeah especially for doing math, I've found it's really helpful that I can just select some equations I wrote and shift them down (or insert more space).
It helps with adding derivations or additional notes after the fact.
However I'm considering moving back to handwritten notebooks for some things, purely due to the simplicity (no worry about battery life, technical issues, or the difficulty in switching back and forth between my book reader and my notes app).
I have been thinking about that with regards to the new generation, I forget where but I saw a YouTube video interviewing Gen Alpha and how they couldn't recognize calligraphy texts.
I was sad, of course, but at the same time, it made me think if their brain is just being shaped differently. Could it be that this sort of thesis "writing = good" applies to us because we belong to a generation that had our formative memories shaped through that activity?
Is there something inherent to writing that makes it good or is it just a consequence because we did things that way?
When learning new languages, frameworks, or systems, I've learned over the last ten years that I -- as ADHD riddled as I am -- retain and engage with information a lot more when I write by hand, even if I am not medicated.
I know this is true and all but I think a lot of people never really write anything anyways. Texting, random notes, emails. Strange to say but it feels kind of hipster and performative with the technology we have, which kind of makes it hard to enjoy. What I mean is I understand the theory but never have a chance to implement it or even want to.
Somewhat related, I've seen more and more colleges now banning devices in class and reverting to handwritten notes and exams only, presumably due to AI. When I went to college this was actually already done, where many professors, even for CS, made you write code by hand. And it's true, it actually helps you reason better when writing it down over typing it.
When i was in college, we wrote a lot of C code in those blue notebooks. And this is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, which is probably why I don't totally didn't hate whiteboard coding tests. And when I'm trying to work with a new programming language or tool, I'm usually writing things out by hand (helps with the memory, like the article referenced).
I’d like to point out that basically all education research is only partially reproducible or not reproducible at all. So even though this study says it’s good for your brain. Have some skepticism.
I like writing by hand and now it’s easier than ever to just take a picture and give it to an LLM for a transcription if you need it on your phone/computer. Small local models work well for this too.
Well, sorry but look at the methodology on this. The study the post leans on did not study learning. 36 adults went around copying familiar words, and their "typing" is key presses using one index finger (!).
I'm afraid this one's close to going down the replication crisis whirlpool. According to Sol:
"Direct replications found no reliable learning advantage, while a 2024 meta-analysis found only a *small* handwriting benefit but a far larger typing advantage in information captured."
Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” by Abraham E. Flanigan and colleagues, published in Educational Psychology Review on July 12, 2024
This is why I use a reMarkable tablet for my notes. I noticed a few years ago that when I wrote down my notes I actually remembered them more easily. Something about the hand/brain connection helped etch my thoughts more deeply.
I still use Apple Notes, but more as a place to store copy/paste info I want to save or checklists. But for meeting or game design notes? Writing those down 100%.
The Remarkable tablet is so close to what I want. I just wish it was 13".
My iPad is 13" and having a a display about the same size as a sheet of A4/letter paper is nice. It's so nice to have a full size display for marking up pdfs.
Now that I've gotten used to the iPad with Goodnotes, I'm not sure I'd get a 13" Remarkable. I'd probably buy one, but I suspect their notes app would be enough of a downgrade that I would probably return it.
How is the remarkable at converting handwritten notes into text? Especially so that you can search over it?
Yeah, I used to handwrite my notes on paper back in the day, and still do for a couple of important topics, but switched over to putting things in Evernote several years ago. The reason is actually do need to do searches over them quite often, and it’s obviously very difficult to do with handwritten documents.
It does a pretty good job. But to be honest I don't use that feature often. I also have the keyboard for it but don't use that often, either. I really mainly use it as a notebook.
I don't know about reMarkable but LLMs are good at recognizing handwriting from photos. I wrote an iOS app to do this for my handwritten diaries, but it works for any handwritten paper: https://inksightful.app/
I'd rather learn a language than write with a pen. In my life at least, writing with a pen is now depreceated. Maybe writing left handed would be worth it but I can't think of another good reason to bring it back.
Probably one of the best interview questions that I've been asked over the years, is to write a script (can't remember the purpose) in bash, using pen and paper.
"Sure, doing X the old-fashioned way is slow, inefficient, and inconvenient in a hundred minor and major ways - but haven't you considered that it might, on an incredibly shaky connection with low effect sizes and uncertain causality, be better than your brain?"
Sorry, but no. I trust that "the Old Way is just Better in an invisible, unproven way" about as much as I trust any other "appeal to tradition".
I like Neal Stephenson's writing, but I wouldn't take this advice seriously.
I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.
It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.
In my first job, my supervisor gave me a Day Timer binder and set of pages for it and I very dependent on it within a few weeks. That thing was always with me and I was a little terrified that I would leave it somewhere. If I were hit by a bus and they gave that book to my replacement, they would have no problem picking up where I left off.
Then I got a series of Palm Pilot devices and left the paper behind. It worked pretty well for me and the grafitti handwriting system was ingenious. Aside from my contact list being duplicated a few times a year, I didn't really have any negative experiences.
Then smart phones hit and even though they can do everything any electronic organizer ever did for me, I've never been as happy with them.
I'm seriously considering buying a paper planner again. Shared calendars is the only thing blocking me.
I love Obsidian too, but for me it's just a place where I park notes for future reference. I don't actively use it.
Writing by hand has some advantages and writing by keyboard also has some advantages. Using note-taking app or similar software is very convenient and useful in some situations.
I have had, and continue having, way above average use for my handwriting. It works for all sorts of math, quick diagrams on anything from geometric reasoning to electronics, composing tricky fragments of text, taking notes on something I'm doing that requires a myriad of easy-to-forget details, and so on.
But my 1st grade teacher and my 1st to 12st year classes variously agreed on how atrocious my handwriting was. Famously, my 1st grade teacher told my parents, "there's no hope". She was right. And, four decades later, it irks me to no end that every time I grab a pen and start writing, the ghosts come to look over my shoulder and judge. "Look at it, he's at it again. That 'f' looks like anything but... That's not a proper uppercase 'I'... you could summon a demon with it, but it would be a pitiful one. That 'g' is vicious. Is that a '1', a '3' or a '7'? Didn't we fail you enough times in basic arithmetic for that? Also, that line of text is sagging as much as your sitting, boy..."
I <3 Stephenson's earlier works: Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and even the lesser stuff (the university one, In the Beginning There Was the Command Line, etc.) were all incredibly well written, and I'd strongly recommend them.
But Cryptonomicon started to go in the wrong direction (though it was still good), and after that he completely lost me by writing 1000 page books that require you to learn half of an entirely new language he made up! His success seems to have made him completely lose the magic (of writing well) that he once had.
As such, I'd take any advice he gives with a mountain of salt. It's like getting advice from a "has been" former athlete: it might be good advice from their glory days, or it might just be junk they spew in their obsolescence.
I swear, early on he wrote well, which means he wrote 1000 pages and edited them down to a normal book.
Once he got popular I imagine he was like "I'm popular, screw that editing stuff, I'm just publishing every word I write" ... and that is not how you make a good book.
i like writing by hand, and definitely generate better content / thoughts. I don't like going back through my writing and putting it in electronic form (an no writing on an electronic device (ipad/remarkable etc.) doesn't is not a substitute).
Sort of. For most letters, my print strokes are the same motion as cursive (except r and s) but lifting up the pen between letters/strokes. Even when I was practiced in cursive, I never felt like it added any time to lift and lower the pen, any more than the time it already took to move the pen to the right, but doing so improved legibility. Its not like I'm consciously thinking about each letter, unlike caligraphy or drafting block print.
I haven't written cursive in many years, i should try it again but since i'm out of practice i find it takes more time to write than going print. Which of course does lead to hand cramps etc
No, definitely not. Although it depends where you are. If you are near South America etc, then Spanish would be useful to know.
I have used it before when I've lost a phone etc, or if I had no way of contacting someone otherwise. I can think of more dramatic situations too. Technology can be helpful but if you're overreliant on it then that is a potential weakness.
I connect letters that are easy to connect and pick up my pen on others. Anything that flows into the next, cursive. Anything where you have to contort and lead in or out with fiddly little bits and then just write the letter anyhow, I just skip all that and write it plain.
I'm surprised he didn't mention editing. On a computer this is trivial; on paper you need an ink eradicator, correction tape, or correction fluid. And even those are only good for small corrections. If you want to insert a sentence or paragraph somewhere, that's not really possible with paper.
Also, if you want your text to be published online or printed, it needs to be digitized somehow. Which is a good OCR tool for handwriting, especially if it's not very legible? Just feed scans into Gemini perhaps?
Agreed. As someone who frequently rearranges the structure and order of sentences as I go, I don't even know how to attempt writing by hand. It would be a complete mess. I expect that the common refrain would be wait until the second draft to make such rearrangements, but it's often the bones of the story I'm trying to set properly, and if the bones are broken, there's nothing for the meat to dangle upon.
But maybe it's different for me, since I write nonfiction?
I suspect it's because Stepenson stopped editing his work a long time ago.
He used to write a ton and edit it down to a normal-sized book, but once he got popular he just decided to (seemingly) publish everything he wrote, without editing.
> If the pen’s ink reservoir is partly empty, so that it contains an air bubble, and if it’s positioned nib down, then, when you go up in an airplane, the bubble will expand as the ambient pressure drops, forcing ink out the nib. Once I figured that out, I got in the habit of making sure my pens were positioned nib up when taking off in an airplane. If I have time I’ll also refill the pen before departure, to minimize the size of the air bubble.
Finally! this was one of those things that bothered me for many years, but not enough to spend time to research :) . Thank you!!
I'm a huge fan of N.S. and what he says might be true, but I have an aversion to writing by hand after being tortured while growing up in the late 80s.
I just couldn't seem to hold a pen or pencil the right way and would always fall behind following along with the rest of the class. I was forced to spend hours at home with worksheets tracing over letters. I was led to believe that if I couldn't write properly I would be a complete failure.
It turns out being able to use a computer and type quickly was a more useful skill.
Something is seriously wrong with an author when they think they need to invent an entire new language (and force the reader to learn half of it) just for a book. ENGLISH IS A PERFECTLY FINE LANGUAGE, AND EVERY GREAT WORK OF ENGLISH WAS WRITTEN USING IT!
Stephenson was my literally my favorite author, but when I got to Anathem I was like fuck this pompous asshat and his made up language BS: I'm sticking to authors who write in English.
> I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm.
Do you think he needs to be a neuroscientist to make this claim?
Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy. Perverse incentives exist in every domain, and you cannot discount the human factor. The experts can be wrong.
And in this case, Van der Meer's experiment showing more "elaborate" brain activity during handwriting was correlational. The conclusion that this leads to better learning outcomes does not follow.
More to your point: calling "appeal to authority" does not license argument from ignorance. Furthermore, appeal to authority only refers to an authority who is not authoritative in the domain in question.
I don't think this is appeal to authority (or the reverse, I guess). Neuroscience is complex, being a scientist/doctor is one signal that the observations here would be based on/reflective of a large body of knowledge. Probably GP's unstated point is that the author isn't a scientist/doctor and they also haven't studied/read up on their own either.
The experts in the sciences usually back their claims up using citations, and can be disproven through the normal methods of disproving citations. not through "vibes"
You've been downvoted to oblivion, but I figured I'll use you as a meat shield since there isn't a single other reply of criticality here AFAICT.
The study talks about connections and frequency, but that seems like a very coarse measure for something as complex as the brain.
> Increased connectivity within the theta (3.5–7.5 Hz) and alpha (8–12.5 Hz) frequency bands has been linked to mechanisms underlying sensorimotor integration (). As increased connectivity in the brain was observed only when writing by hand and not when simply pressing keys on the keyboard, our findings can be taken as evidence that handwriting promotes learning.
Can you? The linked paper appears to be stating association, not causation.
The alternative hypothesis is that the brain activates more because writing by hand is harder, and that by writing by hand you just get better at writing by hand.
My thought is, write in whichever medium you feel you work best in. Maybe try them both. And if you're not productive maybe don't use that medium.
This feels like a lot of grasping to try to justify some retroism (why does it need justification?).
This is a fair response and I think would be a good top level comment, you don't need a meat shield. The reason the parent was downvoted was that it isn't criticism, it's just a declaration that they didn't read the article.
There are a lot of citations in the paper backing up the idea that handwriting promotes learning, though (or at least spelling, memory, recall, and letter recognition/understanding). It reads to me like an attempt to explain an observed phenomenon: "given that handwriting appears to promote learning, what could be a mechanism for that?" It isn't in a vacuum just claiming that "these brain signals clearly prove that learning is happening".
The "general discussion" section also covers why the specific connectivity they looked at might be related to learning.
A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them. Destroy the spine so it’s easier to read, fold pages, write the important stuff inside the front cover of the book. Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates.
Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding.
Don’t get caught up trying to figure out the right notation or highlighter color for a line. Just mark them up and later it’ll make sense.
Edit: I think the broader point that some of you may be missing is that I’m not prescribing a particular form of notetaking. I’m saying that reading is made more rewarding with active engagement. How you best engage is up to you.
I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture.
"Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick.
It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you want to write notes, get a notebook, which gives you space to write real thoughts down. I use a trapper-keeper.
There is nothing wrong with scribbling in your own books.
There is also nothing wrong with donating such books with clearly written disclaimer on the front page about the condition of the book.
Repackaging as 99% likenew and selling them should be a crime though.
it was funny seeing this right below the comment saying "I _love_ buying a used book and finding a previous reader's notes in the margins. It's the greatest.".
different strokes. if you want to ensure you don't get sick from a line being crossed out, buy new.
I have a book (not authored by Edison) that Thomas Edison scribbled his comments in the margin and I was quite happy to read them! Changing my own nearly-religious belief to never write in a book,I found that it totally changed my experience with the book and the author. There are thousands of copies of any particular modern book and it's no longer my task to preserve that unique copy for after the apocalypse. I would like to imagine my children one day being able to see their father's thoughts and dialogue with authors.
This is so condescending. The reason I buy used is that the overwhelming majority of books are out of print and not available digitally. Which makes the vandalism especially egregious!
It's not vandalism. Calling it that is condescending.
You can buy unmarked used books. Just check. (And if you're buying online the state of the book is expected to be in the description.)
vandalism is destruction of someone else's property. that's not what is happening when someone chooses to write in a book that they own.
Your argument is that in order for you to have a better experience the previous owner should not “ruin” the book for you. I’ve read better arguments on bathroom stalls.
No, my argument is that it's totally obnoxious to lend or resell a book that you've written in, and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with. It is precisely what Socrates warned us about.
I'd say this is a problem with the seller's communication, not the use of the book. If the seller didn't specify that the book was marked up, I agree with your sentiment. The act of writing in a book and selling it isn't the issue, but setting false expectations to whoever you're selling it to is.
> and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with
Are we really going to speak down to how someone uses a bunch of paper bound together? That's how they wanted to use it, which is cool, it's just not how you like it.
it's totally obnoxious to buy a copy of a book with notes in it and complain about those notes. 2¢
Aside from shallow, uncritical notes, consider that annotating in a margin is evidence that a reader is actively engaging with a text.
Very often when I write in margins it's to question or argue against what's written (e.g. "really? what about ...", or "no, contradicts ...") which, to me, seems in line with the dialectic process Socrates promoted. Multiple sides, truth-seeking.
Sure, having a spacious notebook on the side is even better. But it's the same goal, isn't it? Engage more deeply with a text and encourage questioning as you read it, while it's still fresh.
> bathroom stalls
That's like, elite literary territory though. Let's stick to the discussion on books.
Some come here to sit and think, but I come here to...
The first time I read "this sentence is false" it was scrawled in a bathroom stall in the philosophy department. Seemed appropriate. Left me wondering how many other people had also sat there pondering it for a few moments, certainly more than that had called that number for a good time.
Perhaps "this sentence is false" was actually the precursor to "Jeopardy", though.
different people work in different ways. just because you hate it doesn't mean it won't be helpful for others.
also if you're buying used books, expect them to be used!
"expect them to be used!"
I would expect them to be in the condition they were graded as. I'll avoid poor or fair condition books that have lots of marking in them. Good books that have minimal marking should be fine to me.
Obviously (I hope), once you've grafittied your book, you shouldn't sell it as unaltered!
That doesn't mean scribbling in your own book is wrong.
You can totally mark up your books. No issue with that, if you like it. I don't personally, but I don't see why someone shouldn't do it. Now should you sell those books? Probably not.
I used to go to a shop in a student area and pick up old Norton's Anthologies. Many of the notes were unintentionally funny. Some are occasionally insightful.
As I say elsewhere, it depends on the edition or book, and how common they are.
I _love_ buying a used book and finding a previous reader's notes in the margins. It's the greatest.
A tiny glimpse into a stranger's thinking as they processed the same pages I just did.
Thoughts they may never have shared anywhere else, that may not have made sense to anyone anywhere else. A secret code only for people who just read the last few pages. Shockingly intimate.
I once borrowed a technical book from my school library, and the previous owner who donated that book in the 90s circled the phrase "proof is left to the readers" commonly found grad math book and wrote a big "W.T.F?". It made me laugh so much hha
Nothing quite the same as making scientific conjectures in your marginalia or jotting down ideas in books and then having strangers find them and reinterpret them their own way.
These were fun to find in college bookstores every semester. Not a fan of "highlight it all" but the occasional enlightened soul with a scientific bent.
You might appreciate this one :) https://allpoetry.com/Marginalia
TANGENT One of my all-time favorite websites:
https://www.themarginalian.org/
Highest possible recommendation for its thoughtful, intelligent, entirely human, poetic writing about various interconnected topics. Maria Popova is a treasure.
> Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates. > Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding
This is actually the biggest reason I own a Remarkable 2/Kindle Scribe, let's me "destroy" the book while also not having to worry about losing my notes.
Honest question: How confident are you that you'll have access to those notes on your Remarkable/Kindle 20 years from now?
I love my Kobo. I highlight stuff with it. But for anything really important, I then go to my computer, go through each highlight, and make notes in my org file.
(I probably should automate it - I know tools exist to extract all that metadata from the Kobo).
> This is actually the biggest reason I own a Remarkable 2/Kindle Scribe, let's me "destroy" the book while also not having to worry about losing my notes.
Well... I'm mostly back to paper after losing most of the notes I had taken on my own Remarkable 2.
Totally agreed. I've never understood why people are so opposed to marginal annotations - it's part of why the book format succeeded as a technology! (i.e you can't marginally annotate a clay tablet). Incidentally, I always loved how Tolkien's maps had these pointing hands to indicate significant bits, and only after reading a lot of old manuscripts and incunabula in grad school did I realize that he was copying the favorite annotation of medieval writers, the manicule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
I so don't have time to revisit books that I've already read. I'd probably be embarrassed by my earlier naiveté.
Yep, and if I did there's no way I'd understand my previous notes.
Yeah I don’t understand highlighting/marking up books
Who actually has time to go back and look at that?
It’s like taking photos of fireworks
For many, the act of note taking, highlighting and marking up enhances the value of the reading. Revisiting is secondary.
This is eminently true for me. I rarely revisit notes, but if I take notes I have a much better recall and understanding than if I just consume the content.
I love nothing more than going through my mom’s cookbooks and seeing all her notes. It connects me with her even though she’s gone.
> A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them
I do all that, all the time these days... :-) I thoroughly enjoy it! Sometimes I feel like having discussions (disagreeing or agreeing) with the author and will write entire pro/cons examples and/or arguments.
No. Carry a notebook. Long after you’ve given the book away, you’ll always have your notes.
why not both? mark up the book while you're reading, reflect in your notebook on what you read
Exactly. Personally, I gravitate toward book and topic-specific notes and highlights in the book itself and use the notebook for bigger-picture things for which book references play some role. I do a lot of highlighting in ebooks and lately I've started using LogSeq. I'll pull quotes from books into LogSeq and then tag them with whatever #bigger-picture topic I deem relevant, mimicking what I do on paper.
The notes only make sense with context. I'm not interested in copying three or so sentences for every small comment or even just a highlight.
Do you have tips to start using notebooks instead of marking books? I personally like to underline stuff in my books, when I start a new novel it's often people, places and events. I'm not sure what would be the notebook equivalent of that. Writing down what I would underline? It seems tedious and you loose context and the sense of proximity between words.
For my textbooks, I use little record cards. I write the book reference on the top line, then whatever notes or quotations etc. If it's a heavily referred to book, I sometimes use different colour cards to mean different things.
When I return the book to the library etc., I take all my record cards out and put them in a little perspex index box.
Sometimes I use the record cards to then start some more detailed notes in a notebook; sometimes the record cards refer to a page in my notebooks where I've attempted a derivation etc.
"Write by hand and mark up your books" is excellent advice... that I no longer follow.
Marking up books didn't come naturally to me, but I did it for a while. Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral. The illusion of permanence must be confronted and reckoned with.
But for the last 15-20 years, I have been taking notes in text files that are saved to version control, which I find suits me better.
* Notes are not space-constrained by the space of the page margins, nor by the initial form they take on the paper page.
* Notes can be revised at will without requiring complete duplication to maintain optimal appearance and organization. There is no reason to resist revising notes — the history is completely preserved in old versions, so nothing will ever be destroyed even if deleted. Even though those old versions will almost certainly never be revisited, knowing that they exist frees the mind.
* I can indulge my perfectionism and write math notes in LaTeX, music notes in Lilypond, diagrams using SVG... The act of typesetting is itself a form of active engagement the source material, although it does not have all the advantages of hand-copying and can be time-consuming.
* Digital notes take up no physical space, compatible with a minimalist lifestyle. They can expand infinitely without needing to be stored or carted around.
* Digital notes don't need to be defended against physical threats such as fire, flood, or vermin. However digital notes still require precautions to preserve them in the form of a backup regime, so this is something of a wash.
* Ultimately, I don't expect anyone but me to be interested in my notes, and I don't owe anyone my notes. When I'm gone, the notes will vanish into nothingness — and since they are not constrained by being part of a legacy for heirs to pick through, they can take whatever form suits me best during my life.
I think the main point being conveyed is that writing by hand improves recollection. Whether it comes naturally or not, or whether it is a better system or not, of course is subjective. However there is truth in the notion.
When I draw something I can remember the shapes better than if I simply sit there and stare at it. Something with the hand-eye coordination triggers the brain into remembering.
Typing in contrast, one is not tracing the shapes of the letters (the thing to remember), but pushing buttons that are not physically related.
It’s the same thing as if you can touch and hold an object it becomes much more real than if you can see it in a picture or on a screen. Remembering is connected better to touch.
Yes, writing by hand is an experience that offers unique benefits. The physical act helps to consolidate and integrate knowledge — improving recollection is one benefit, although I'd emphasize improving intuition as more valuable.
The primary activity of note-taking is forming words and grappling with ideas, though — it's not like all benefits are lost when using a keyboard. To a certain extent other activities like typesetting achieve similar ends.
My brother writes novels longhand, and I've thought hard about this topic. Ultimately, certain personality quirks held me back and I never felt carefree when hand-writing notes. Version control liberated me.
> Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber
Enjoy notes the way you want!
But when I re-read a book I’ve previously annotated, I get a rush of the time and place it happened, 20 years later. It’s crazy.
We are tactile beings who exist and connect in 3D space and brains remember ideas in locations.
I love files. But I think strong entities are trying to rip control away, with stupid consequences like making .txt obsolete.
Books have a good chance outlast a)mediums and b)formats. They have a good track record. Check back in 5000 years.
I was once telling a friend about a book I had just finished. They were curious about it and asked me to borrow it. I politely accepted knowing very well they could never read my copy for it was embarrassingly covered in the messy marks I had enjoyed making during my read. Fortunately neither of us ever brought the subject again and I now think twice before messing up my books!
I wouldn't consider those things embarrassing. You may even consider it an opportunity to discuss the book at a later date?
Michael Stevens (of Vsause fame) copies long quotes into notebooks, and he claims the act of writing it helps him remember. And if it's not worth writing, it's not a good enough quote.
I need to remember that this is okay. I didn't do it because of concerns about resale value... but recently I sold books for the first time in a while and got so little money that I realize this is not worth worrying about.
My grandad had a big library of books, but in his obsession of preservation, he wrapped all of their covers in gift wrap paper. It kind of defeated the purpose of having so many books in a library. You weren't able to browse them easily. I should go dive into them to take some some.
In middle school we had to make covers for all our textbooks on the first day of school (it was a school requirement, I guess to get a bit more lifespan out of the books). We used brown paper from old grocery bags.
Of course a lot of kids would then personalize their books with artwork and stickers. I guess it was that generation's equivalent of covering a laptop with stickers.
I did the same but had forgotten all about it until just now. I still put all the random stickers that accumulate throughout the year on my journal, it's a fun visual reminder of entirely random little things that happened during the year.
Marginalia is the best! I have a handwritten note about Ayn Rand in my 27 year old copy of Enchridion, a great reminder that she is like chicken pox, better catch her as early as possible. And several books such as I Claudius held together with duct tape. And soy sauce stains in Gargantua and Pantagruel from the place my grad school gf worked. Those count.
A bit of irony, going through old stuff I found a copy of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line on top of handwritten running logs from sr yr of college. In that book, there was a ticket stub from the time I was 86ed from an amusement park. (I did not eat enough after training that morning.) I was escorted on a golf cart back to our car where I finished Neal's now charmingly quaint essay with the plastic handle listening to Nirvana.
This was August 2001 and Mac OS X had barely come out. Maybe AI rhymes where Chinese free open-models clean up but someone proprietary figures it out. Which is sad as someone dominant in the ecosystem right now is the equivalent of Gary Kildall.
Geez, if she is like chicken pox, what do we get that is like shingles later? :/
The current administration
+1 I have read most of Rand's works. She grew up in the Soviet Union and hated collectivism and carried it very much too far. Still I find value in her work, and if she were here today I would bet $100 that she would disapprove of the current administration.
I have a better way. Make a notebook and write stuff down there.
Unless it's from the library. I've had to keep an eraser handy to undo some rando's bizarre markups.
If I'm really studying a book I'll have an office supply store cut the spine out and make the book spiral bound. It's pretty cheap to do it too, like $10 or something.
I use high-quality tape on the spine after flattening it for easy reading; still flattens well, but holds together longer.
I recently overcame this as I've been reading more of the unread books populating my shelves. I always wanted to keep my books in pristine condition and never wanted to mark them up. Now, I realize they are part of MY collection and marking them up with highlights, underlines, notes, etc., only make them more valued since they contain their intrinsic knowledge from the author as well as my own views. Even if I want to give them to friends to read, they'll see areas that jumped out to me and maybe appreciate some of the additional context or focus I noted as well.
Aside from my college books, I rarely marked any physical books up. When I went to ebooks on tablets from hardcopy, briefly, I got into notes and whatnot with MoonReader for a couple years (like 2013-2015). Don't see any point in it now. Mostly just questions, and always about non-fiction.
What's annoying are people who want other people to find their notes in books (and even sell them for the ego aspect).
> A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up!
Not library books though.
Every so often I get one with stuff underlined with pen or highlighter, and it's one of things that really makes me angry. (Lightly in pencil I'm okay with.)
Better yet, take actual notes abd give yourself space to think: https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-02-17-how-to-capture-book-no...
I don't mean this with any disrespect, but people love to find ways to overcomplicate things that work perfectly well. And maybe for some reason that overcomplicated version works better, but for many it's at best a waste of time, at worst an active distraction from the thing your trying to do.
Agreed. The important thing is to find something that works perfectly for you. Oftentimes I think people find their own perfect system and conflate it with being the perfect system.
True :)
Eep, I guess it depends on what kind of learner you are. For me, the notes being in the book, and the book being somewhere on my shelf spatially encodes it into my mind.
Offloading things into a centralized store according to a system not only causes me anxiety but it doesn’t have the same spatial kick.
I agree with the spatial memory and the many possible and valid ways to approach reading and learning. But it's much harder to recall, connect and leverage ideas that way
I used to take notes on loose sheets of paper, fold them, and stuff them into the book between pages. I guess there are lots of ways to build a system.
A few books I've taken enough notes to collect them in a folder. I put section tabs in the book and tabbed dividers into the folder with matching colors. I note the page numbers for each note. Then I shelve that folder to the right of the book it was noting.
not as much as I used to but I still take handwritten notes when reading something I deem worth doing so by some personal semi-rational algorithm. my favorite exercise ~15 years ago was reading People's History of the US and Kissinger's Diplomacy at the same time, and taking notes in the same notebook in parallel columns. Naturally I went into product
I started doing this in cookbooks, less of this, this needs longer time in the oven, etc.
The first time it felt like a crime.
I use a folded computer paper as a book mark and take notes on that with a page number for reference. It preserves the book and makes it easier to find what I want.
Yes! 100x this. I do this all the time with my print technical books.
Advice from an inexperienced reader, please disregard (and don’t do this to library books!)
I buy paperbacks, chop and scan them [1] then use a reMarkable tablet + RCU [2] to do the reading.
Digitizing paper books and writing on them with digital ink is 100% the best way to have marginalia. I've tried special dotcode pens, portable scanners...writing digitally with a stylus is the best. Yes, it destroys the paper book, but it more than makes up for it with the freedom, flexibility, and durability of the digital copy.
[1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/books/ [2]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
Depends on the edition. I lent a book years ago to someone that was destroyed by damp on a window sill. I've never been able to get another copy of it.
A less rare book in a mass market edition would be another thing.
> Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates.
I hate it when people do this. Please don't. If you must, do it sparingly and for the love of all that's good please do not cross out words or sentences.
The only thing I can forgive is people who quote a particular paragraph they liked about the book in one of the first pages where there's enough blank space. It's a personal touch that doesn't taint the rest of the book.
Some mark that this belonged to someone, maybe from decades ago, can be charming; but please, do not ruin the book for me by scribbling all over it.
> please, do not ruin the book for me
It all boils down to this: if it's a personal book that I don't intend to share with anyone ever, then I'll scribble all I want¹.
If I think it could be read by others in the future or it's obviously meant to be read by others (library loan) then don't.
And instead take notes on the side, with page reference if you really want to refer back to a specific page at some point.
---
¹ There's always a risk that a nosy kid finds my scribbled advanced-potion-making book in the future, but what's the worst that could happen?
Fair enough.
I always assume someone will inherit my books, either when I die, or because I gave them away as gifts or exchanged them for other books at a used books shop.
This is my stance by default, but let's say there's a book I love which I never intend to part with, even then I would feel bad about crossing words out. After all, if I love the book, what's this "violent" disagreement/scribbling about?
> But please, do not ruin the book for me by scribbling all over it.
How would someone writing in their copy of a book impact your ability to enjoy your own copy? Relax, it's their property and it's not criminal, so let them do what they want instead of trying to dictate rules.
Because I inherited the copy, maybe as a gift or bought at a used books shop? It's obvious from context I'm speaking of books that ended up with me, otherwise how would I even know they scribbled all over them?
> Because I inherited the copy, maybe as a gift or bought at a used books shop?
If it's from a book shop, you can thumb through it and choose to not buy it. If it's inherited or a gift, then what's the harm? Just discard it if it's been "ruined" or shelve it if there's some sentimental reason to keep it, and get a clean copy to read.
> It's obvious from context I'm speaking of books that ended up with me,
I doubt any of my books will end up with you nor will the books of the vast majority of HN readers and commenters, so why should any of us care about your peculiarities and avoid doing something that works for us and that we want to do?
> If it's from a book shop, you can thumb through it and choose to not buy it. If it's inherited or a gift, then what's the harm? Just discard it if it's been "ruined" or shelve it if there's some sentimental reason to keep it, and get a clean copy to read.
Sometimes you can thumb through and discover flaws, sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you can get that exact edition in better conditions, sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you buy a lot of used books, and cannot check every one of them. It's always a disappointment to find a book with pages all scribbled over.
> I doubt any of my books will end up with you
You're being too literal here.
If you don't care about my "peculiarities", just don't engage with me. Someone mentioned their attitude towards scribbling, and I cared enough to offer a counterargument on why I dislike it. Feel free to sit this one out.
I've always been pretty skeptical of the data which says handwriting is better for learning than typing. Yes, handwriting causes more brain activity, but just because your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!
For example, if I asked you to code FizzBuzz while riding a unicycle, I'm pretty sure you would show more brain activity than if you were just sitting at a desk. This does not mean it's an efficient way to program, nor that coding on a unicycle is better for learning.
I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
When I take notes when typing, I can transcribe the content word-for-word without knowing what I am hearing and without thinking about it.
When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.
I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.
Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.
> I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.
If lots of people said they code better while riding a unicycle, I'm not sure I'd just dismiss it off hand.
Riding a unicycle and coding are not complementary activities - you are multitasking. Writing is aligning different parts of your brain to the same task, perhaps it is just creating additional focus.
There is no logical connection between moving a pencil to construct letterforms and deciding what you want to say. They have traditionally happened together, because before computers (or to some extent before typewriters) there was no better way to do one without the other.
The studies I'm familiar with have tested recall at various intervals, not brain activity.
It probably depends on the task. I find that writing things out by hand is extremely helpful for memorizing.
This is how it was explained to me by a tutor: handwriting is better for learning because it's slower. The need for brevity forces you to mentally engage the material in ways that are more conducive to understanding and recall.
If you can replicate that mental engagement while typing, you'd probably get similar results.
This makes a lot of sense to me in light of what we know about how learning happens. I have never seen any research on brain activity though, and my tutor didn't cite any.
IME it's not just about slower. It's about forcing you to think about how words go together, where line breaks fall, how you're laying out bullet points, etc.
Since you can change all of this on computers (or it happens automatically), you don't have to give it thought before writing it down.
I've heard this theory too—but I feel it doesn't match how we do anything else in life. For example, you could make typing slower by forcing people to type with two fingers, or use a really tiny keyboard. Are touch typists worse at learning?
This doesn't really refute the theory—maybe touch typing is worse—but that doesn't match my logical intuition at all.
> Are touch typists worse at learning?
Wish I had a definitive answer. I do know from personal experience that when I'm touch typing notes while reading a book or listening to a lecture, my thoughts drift fairly often. (I'm a fairly fast touch typist though, 140+ w/m.) I'm also more likely to be thinking, "damn, that's a lot of notes!" rather than about the material, lol. Whereas while handwriting, I'm heavily engaged with the material, to the point where I often forget that I'm in the middle of taking notes.
Oh and because it's so easy to make quick edits while typing, I find it hard to resist the impulse to correct a typo or add an extra word here and there, which further distracts me from the material.
Also, I can touch type for long stretches without the slightest mental fatigue, but I need a tiny mental break after 30-60 seconds of handwriting.
The problem is you immediately assume studies haven’t thought of that
Do you know that is how simplistic these studies actually are?
Well, it's not only my criticism. For example, here is one on the very study TFA links: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
A lot of education research is really, shockingly bad. (And, to be clear, a lot of it is also really good!)
>your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!
the thing it's doing when writing with your hand is fine motor control, one of the most important and distinguishing abilities that humans have.
I tutor in a makerspace and one thing I've observed it's that it's now easier to teach old people how to solder than younger kids, and that in my experience has never been the case before. Due to growing up on impoverished digital interfaces I see lack of dexterity that I've never seen in young people before. Same reason I suspect you see a decline in people picking up tactile musical instruments like the guitar or violin.
I agree that fine motor control is important, I just don't think forcing people (especially kids) to write by hand is necessarily the best way to do it. For example, if the kids went to your makerspace, they could learn fine motor control and probably enjoy themselves more.
Forcing people to handwrite both makes writing more laborious and takes away from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts. At minimum, when handwriting you can't go back and insert words or rearrange sentences to try out different ideas.
I do still think kids should learn how to write by hand, because it's culturally important. However, I think it could be emphasized somewhat less, and I don't think schools should teach cursive (which, anecdotally, I think is actually having a small resurgence in many schools).
It actually is difficult to find an exercise for developing fine motor control that is as complete and as cheap as practicing handwriting.
All other exercises would need more expensive tools and after inventing a sufficient number of different patterns for other activities, that would be practically equivalent with writing a different alphabet on another medium than paper, e.g. carving wood or stone, etc.
I did not like to use handwriting for things like taking notes at school or at the university, and I switched to typewriting as soon as I could afford a computer. For work purposes I now use only typewriting.
Despite this, I am very grateful that in the first years of school I was forced to practice handwriting, even if I have abandoned decades ago the style of handwriting that I was taught.
The reason is exactly what the previous poster has said, that this practice of handwriting as a child was essential for developing the motor control that I needed later as an electronics engineer for soldering or for assembling and disassembling various miniature devices.
>from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts
for one it's not clear to that this is what is actually important in writing or unrelated. That's just a bias in a culture that systematically neglects embodied practice.
In Japan there's an increasing phenomenon of Kanji-illiteracy among the young. Turns out there is a close connection between writing them out, the order of strokes and the physical activity and the memorizing of meaning of the Kanji, just passive observation or digital input can't replicate. There's a reason calligraphy is such an important tradition. There's an inherent connection from your hand, to your working memory to the processing of symbolic meaning.
This mirrors the discourse you see in math. "Rote memorization, writing equations, isn't important, you need to be able to think" turns out it really isn't and countries that teach traditionally excel at math. We live in an educational culture of thinking-pilled people who disregard the physical world and practice with abysmal results.
> "Rote memorization isn't important, you need to be able to think" turns out it really isn't and countries that teach traditionally excel at math.
...this is very much not my understanding of the literature on math education, I'm not sure what you're referencing.
Speaking of ancient practices coming back into favor: Are other people thinking meditation would be useful as they wait for their LLM to finish?
I've incorporated back writing by hand some time ago but find as models get smarter and I throw more at them they have also been taking longer.
In these moments even a notebook can register as something of a distraction. I already aim to keep my phone far away but I'm curious about trying to commit to meditating between prompts. Part of me feels like it would be a little silly. But maybe not.
Doodling in a notebook feels preferable in these moments but also feels like a context switch when the agent is done. Then again perhaps I need to just refine my process so notebook planning can feel like it is working more in parallel with the LLM rather than us blocking each other...
I find his dismissal of iPad writing to be unconvincing. He talks about how we have calibrated our writing utensils over centuries to involve the proper amount of friction, and how that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing on an iPad.
That may be true, but it's not like you can't just re-acclimate to the experience of writing on an iPad. Most people don't handwrite much, period, so if they start handwriting again they're going to have to have an adjustment period either way.
I personally would think that the the benefits of digital writing (searchability, portability, infinite canvas, handwriting cleanup, digitization) would outweigh his friction quibbles. I personally don't find it to be tiring to write on an iPad, even without a screen protector (which some people use to increase friction). Also, e-paper devices tend to have more friction-y feedback, but he doesn't address this at all when dismissing all "gadgets" outright.
The study he cites is also specifically using digital pens
> Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard
kinda funny.
It's also not clear from this study that there is actually any benefit to "more brain activity". Of course doing more complex motor tasks requires more brain activity but nobody guarantees that this helps with remembering things.
My issue with the iPad is that it just does not have the fine-fidelity or response time of real ink, and it's not something that never fails.
It's so frustrating to be so pregnant with an idea, to open ones iPad, and to find out the battery is low, Procreate isn't working, the Notes app is confusing to navigate, oh no you're writing but your palm has slid on the screen, etc.
I've spent a lot of time searching for a digital alternative, but IMO we're at least a decade away from digital handwriting being even close to on-par with paper, even ignoring friction and feel.
I do find the iPad battery drain to be annoying and inexplicable. When they first came out, iPads held a charge for weeks in standby. New ones drain in a few days, even when background app activity and such are disabled. And you're right that it is frustrating to pick up your iPad and discover that the battery is near-dead, which happens with surprising frequency.
That critique doesn't apply to Remarkables or Kindle Scribes though.
I have a "paper-feel" screen protector and a metal nib on my Apple pencil. The combination provides a comfortable amount of friction for me, and the fact that it's matte cuts down on reflections.
Friction is also variable, with pen and paper type. Although the iPad is a bit too slick, it gets very fatiguing (I did most of my HW in college on the iPad)
It may be the case that the iPad is slicker than ideal for some people, but even if that's the case it doesn't relate to his point about centuries of adaptation or whatever. In the past, we were limited by the laws of physics and the materials available in our environment. If people could have had whiteboards 200 years ago instead of chalkboards, they would have taken them (easier to erase, no chalk dust). But they didn't have them, so they didn't use them.
iPad is terrible for hand-writing. It's (relatively) heavy, so you can't hold it and write on it. It's slippery, and the friction between the pen and stylus is bad.
The pen itself also produces gigantic strokes.
The stroke size is highly customizable. What do you mean "the friction between the pen and stylus is bad"? As others have pointed out, you can get screen protectors and nibs for Apple pencils.
Always found that writing stuff down helps me to remember things better, whether studying something, prepping for an exam, or in general. Didn't even matter if I didn't look at those notes again, it just got "stored" better.
Didn't know he is a lefty too! Fountain pens + lefty is a tough combo; we had to use fountain pens in the 1st grade and my wrist was always stained on the side. Agree with the rollerball angle, Pilot V5 is my go to now...
I noticed this as well and the question caused me to go pretty deep into writing in general.
Switched to a 36 key ergo split with a tweaked alpha-thumb layout (R is on my left thumb, Space is on the right, base layout is Hands Down Vibranium V). Started learning Pitman shorthand (again) then switched to Noory Simplex and stuck with it. Became fascinated with Zaner's Method of cursive where the writing is done entirely through arm movement and using the rhythm of the muscle movement instead of by conscious control over the pen position. At the moment I can write at about 100wpm on a keyboard, 70wpm in shorthand, and 26wpm longhand.
I believe that the improved ability to learn comes from the need to focus on a concept for longer while writing and not on the motion of the writing itself. My ability to retain is better in cursive than in shorthand and I don't notice a significant difference in retention between keyboard and shorthand.
I've thought about how hard it must be to be a lefty fountain pen user. What is one to do? Learn to write without resting your hand on the page?
Actually, paper orientation was a big help too. Used to tilt the sheet so you write almost bottom-to-top, that way you at least don't smuge the writing right away, and hopefully the ink dries quick enough for the next line
If you read the linked post, he covers this
Wow, I can't believe Neal Stephenson of all people writes exclusively by hand. His books are tomes.
I totally buy that this is the case for him. I wonder how much is just what he's used to vs what's actually better. I feel like I write so slow compared to how fast I type that I struggle to put the words together on the paper. I can spurt out something with a keyboard 10x as fast, and then re-review and re-organize and all that.
If writing by hand is good for your brain (and I suspect it is), the slowness may be part of the reason for that.
Knowing that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes his prose can read like a sentence that was started but he’s too much effort in to give up on. It probably helps his writing to do it by hand - you can’t edit quickly on the fly with paper (unless you’re cutting stuff out). I could see this as being part of his process - just write and let the editing happen later.
Whatever the process it is, long as his books may be, it works.
This actually explains why I've never been able to get into his writing despite rave reviews and countless recommendations by people I know. Something about his writing always just felt tedious to me. Im an avid reader btw.
His earlier stuff was much better. If you tried Snow Crash or Diamond Age and didn't like them, he's not the author for you, but if you tried his more recent crap like Anathem I would strongly advise you not to judge him based on it.
Give his earlier works a try and you may find he used to be able to write well (ie. he used to actually edit his work), before he stopped caring and just wrote 1000 pages of unfiltered garbage.
I gave up on the Baroque Cycle, personally, because it felt like it was taking as long to read as it was taking to hand-write.
The point is to write better, not faster.
I wonder if Brandon Sanderson writes by hand :-D
David Foster Wallace was a longhand manuscript writer too.
Speed is the enemy.
I wonder if fiction writing at that level is like coding. You can learn to type and navigate really fast, but unless you're working on blub software, if you're doing something interesting and novel, you won't actually get to the goal faster. The bottleneck is the ideas, the structure of the story and the development of the characters, amongst many other concerns.
I was cleaning my office a couple of days ago and found stacks upon stacks of paper. I've had a habit for over a decade of taking printer paper, folding it half length-wise, and scribbling notes on it as I work. I use it like a temporary scratch pad. It is an ingrained habit at this point, as soon as I have difficult focused work to do I reach for the paper and pen. Urgent site-wide outage? Start scribbling. Big feature decomposition? Start scribbling.
So I have this massive stack of notes that I glimpse at before shredding or whatever. Nothing of permanent value, nothing that I look at even 24 hours after it is written. But the sheer volume of the writing like that I do surprises me ever time I clean it out. It's like a novella sized stack of paper with server names, sketchy diagrams, peoples names, dates, commit hashes, debug messages. Lots and lots of lists. Things underlined, circled, stars, strike through, arrows, etc.
It is such an ingrained habit that its almost a compulsion, like someone is tying my hand behind my back if I don't have access. It is like my brain needs reassurance that some detail I just noticed won't be lost, at least it will be on the paper if I need it in the next 5 minutes. Like an extension of my short-term memory.
I have also kept a journal for 20+ years, mostly on paper. I often use a fountain pen (Lamy 2000) and notebooks with high-quality paper, but I am not super picky about it. I've used the cheapest school notebooks to the finest Japanese boutique papers. I'm a fan of the Pilot G2 and pens that have a similar feel. I'll also journal in Google Docs, Apple notes, or text docs in VS Code.
It is hard for me to disentangle the supposed benefits from the sheer weight of habit. It is just something I do, part of who I am.
I’ve recently gone back to writing by hand, at least for text that is of a reasonable length. The workflow that works for me is a third-party app on my iPad that converts my handwriting to digital text that I can then paste somewhere.
I’m sure, as the author says, it’s not as good as the real deal of writing with an actual pen, but I need it to be digital text eventually and don’t want to waste a lot of paper. I have found that I’m more creative and enjoy writing more.
I taught Gore Vidal how to use a computer in 1995. After a week worth of trying to use a PowerBook Duo, he went back to pen and paper. When asked how to improve my writing, he said use a pen and transcribe your favorite author. That I would eventually find the rhythm and style and make it my own.
As I understand it, that's more or less what Benjamin Franklin says he did to become a better writer.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2017/10/02/how-ben-franklin...
i've actually had marketed to me on the socials a course on "transcribing" professional writers demonstrating various angles of the craft. I'm sure the course was vibed or something. Pretty easy to identify authors you like, and whose dialog snaps, whose descriptions you identify with, whose doing great character development, etc. And then transcribe them....
EDIT: maybe the term I was looking for is: copywork?
Benjamin Franklin said the same in his autobiography. I wonder if Gore Vidal had read it.
Very interesting. Hunter S. Thompson described the same technique for learning to write. I'll try it even if it only gets applied to technical blog posts...
I always remembered this anecdote. Was he a fan of retyping books? Or writing long hand?
That's really cool. I read Lincoln when I was around 18 and it has always stuck with me. The books you read become a part of you; they grow your view of the world. Books are the only way we have to capture the experience or mind of another person, and directly transfer not only their words but almost a sliver of the authors soul directly to others. Movies, sure.. But books hook into the imagination and mind.
> "don't use a gadget"
I agree with this but for a different reason than what the author gives.
When you write in a notebook you can see where what you are writing is within the notebook (e.g. ~1/3 of the way through, etc). That seems like a small thing but I think it really helps with anchoring the memory when writing, as well as with referencing it later. And of course you can also add all sorts of tabs and page markers to help even more.
The same is true when reading a book.
So I should buy a drawing tablet for my laptop so I can hand write my AI prompts? Got it!
(/s if not obvious!)
As a child I was diagnosed with a condition known as dysgraphia, which makes it difficult for me to make my hand write what my mind wants it to without straining myself. Typing doesn't seem to be as affected for me for some reason.
Sometimes I'll skip whole letters in a word without thinking and need to go back fill it in. Sometimes my baselines will drift as I write a sentence despite the paper _being lined_. Cursive is nearly impossible for me without extraordinary effort, despite me thinking it beautiful and wishing to improve my abilities there.
Dysgraphia for me makes it difficult to write for extended periods of time, and results in very poor handwriting. In fact, the reason I first got a computer as a little kid was so that I could type school assignments, and this was in elementary school in the 90s when everything was still handwritten where I grew up. I even typed my math homework with awkward notation in College (my professors hated me).
All of that said, I still find that I agree with the sentiment of this post, and I do keep notebook. It's laborious for me to write, but I still find that the intentionality and forethought that it demands produces (think about it, you're committing something immutable in the real world with ink and paper) something we're losing: deeper introspection. I know this might sound silly or pretentious like hipsters and vinyl records, but I think there's something in physical writing worth keeping despite its inconveniences.
I was filling notebooks too quickly and didn’t know what to do with them so I switched to a Kindle Scribe. It’s more expensive than a bunch of nice paper notebooks but it’s worked well for me. I export my handwritten notes for safe keeping and can have AI conversations with them as material. I also tried Kindle HD tablets, which worked just as well, but I got a lot of eye strain since I also work on a computer all day.
I always wrote by hand - probably because I spent over a decade in academia dealing with equations. I always have a pen in my pocket (without a pocket protector!)
About a decade ago I went back to writing with fountain pens after a nearly two decade hiatus. Oh, the joy!
But very sad he has no (real) tips on dealing with hand fatigue - other than to write in cursive. I always had hand fatigue for writing long stretches of prose - even back in my school days. A few years ago, I simply had to change how I grip the pen to reduce the pain, but I still can't write many pages without significant pain and the need for breaks. I can't imagine writing a whole novel that way.
Also, I wish he told us how he gets that handwritten stuff into digital form. Does he just mail handwritten stuff to the publishers?
In the past, I'd write twice: Once by hand, and then I'd type up anything worth saving to get it in digital form. A royal pain!
Then with Whisper and LLMs, life got a lot better. I would simply read what I'd handwritten, and get an LLM to clean it up. I only occasionally needed to fix it up after that.
Now LLMs are so good at it that I simply take a picture and send it to the LLM for transcribing.
I don't care how much people hate AI - for me it has quite literally reduced physical pain in my life.
The muscles in your hand and fingers are small and tire pretty easily. The muscles in your arm and shoulder are bigger and can do a lot more work. Back in the day, folks who were taught "business cursive" like the "Palmer Method" were taught to keep their hand mostly static, and to guide the pen strokes using their arm. The way I do it is by planting my forearm on the desk as a pivot point, and moving my arm and shoulder to make the pen move. It took some getting used to, but my handwriting looks about the same as it did before, but no more hand pain.
Learn to write with both hands. When one becomes fatigued switch to the other one.
I also write with fountain pens these days. Do you have a favorite model?
It changes every few years.
My first was the Pilot Metropolitan. Still a solid pen I recommend.
My next favorite was/is a PenBBS - perhaps the 309 - I don't have it on me at the moment. I replaced the nib with a Goulet nib, and somehow made it extremely smooth. I've not been able to make any other Goulet nib that smooth - somehow got lucky.
These days I'm heavily using a Platinum Plaisir which is also surprisingly smooth (no modifications).
Every time I've paid more than $50 for a pen, it hasn't been worth it. I can't get the ink in my Opus 88 pen to flow consistently. I'm sick of it.
I'm partial to Faber Castell nibs, but the pen I bought had a grip that I didn't like, and I don't want to spend the money to try their other pens.
I've always love stationery. Over the years I've looked up pen reviews and tried out many different types including fountain pens.
I watched a video recently from someone, from memory the creator behind the youtube channel vsauce. Very briefly, he lost some notes to water. His words, thoughts and ideas vanished. His solution was switching to pencil.
I found the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfY2JACiDGU
I'm addicted to people talking about pens and pencils. Adam Savage also has done a few videos on his favourite mechanical pencil.
Apparently Stephenson loves fountain pens and reluctantly gel pens. In general, those are water based inks and will wash away with water. There are one or two fountain pen inks designed to be more permanent and won't wash away with water.
Just something to keep in mind if you're currently writing or want to start.
I did some fade tests with several pens and a pencil on a laser print. The pencil and toner were the only things that hadn’t faded in direct sunlight after two years. Even high end pens faded.
To be fair, your notebook probably won’t get light like that, but pencils are pretty archival.
Interesting. I wonder if in 100 years time Stephenson's fountain pen writing will still be around. No doubt they are all scanned, but, maybe the originals will fade.
I saw another video about someone's favourite pen and he gave the reason as check fraud. Apparently the uniball 207 is pigment based ink and doesn't wash away in acetone.
I just searched then on youtube for acetone pen check fraud and it looks like there's a 13 year old video about it, and a million copycats. Either copycats are lazy, or the 207 is still $2 13 years later.
Don't underestimate the importance of a pen, ink, and paper you like. I found my pen a decade ago: Lamy Studio, in British Racing Green, with a medium nib. I found my ink not long after, from J Herbin's collection.
It wasn't until I got a nice notebook from Leuchtturm 1917, though, that the ensemble came together and I started looking for excuses to get my kit out and write things down. Since then, I've moved onto notebooks from de Kempen, but the point stands
A nice pen is... nice. But it's as easy to fall into geeking out about pens and paper as it is keyboards, knives and other kitchen utensils, tools, etc. In most cases, any pen is as good as any other. Or just find a cheap mass produced pen that feels good in your hand. They are plentiful. Then buy a stock of them.
I actually like using pencils, with a thick lead because I tend to have a pretty heavy hand when writing and I will continually break a thin lead.
I'd like to go back to writing with pen and paper, but my bad handwriting bothers me. So any time I start writing something, part of my concentration is wasted on trying to make it look good.
I literally can't think without a pen in my hand. Especially when I'm stuck, writing anything, or even better, drawing, activates my brain cells.
Typing forces you to think linearly, it feels constrained. That's not how the brain works.
I like writing by hand, but I don’t agree with the logic that it’s good because it recruits more areas of the brain. The less effective the medium is, the more of the brain it will recruit; chiseling on a stone tablet is probably a more complex task and it probably gives a more broad stimulus to the brain, but it does not mean it’s such a good idea. I would personally prefer to use a text editor for effective writing and then crochet for fine motor skill.
Right, it's a false signal. It doesn't mean that more things are retained.
I think what happens in these types of threads is that the people who like handwritten notes, perhaps even obsessively so, all pour in. But that population of handwriting fans isn't necessarily representative of the population overall.
I don't doubt the premise, but this sounds like another in a long series of Doing X May Delay Onset of Alzheimers articles.
Most of which includes the author's favorite mental task, food, or exercise.
There was a study with nuns in the early 2000s which found them doing crossword puzzles daily....
I really like this talk[0] by Big Suze from Peep Show on how children learn better with physical writing than with typing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88
I don’t know about the brain but it’s good for the final results in my experience coding, writing and composing (orchestral music). The results are better and it takes less time if I start with pen and paper before “committing” to the computer. One of my favorite authors Jennifer Egan also writes fiction on paper (non-fiction articles still on the computer). More thoughts: https://www.phpied.com/starting-in-the-analog-domain/
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck? I have thought long and hard about this, and I have settled on taking notes by typing on my laptop. The benefits are far too many: I do not have to carry my notes around to read them on the commute; I do not have to worry about losing them; I can rewrite them to my heart’s content without messing up the layout; and I feel that I type faster than I can write.
I do partly agree, though. When I am studying a new concept or reviewing old ones, I tend to scribble my thoughts down. I have not been able to replicate brainstorming while scribbling and doodling on an electronic device. The friction of my pen on paper seems to actually wire the pathways in my brain.
That was a reccomendation from a philosophy professor I had in college. By the end of the semester, I didn't even have to review my notes.
I went back to school at 25, and that moment made me realize why school felt strangely more difficult, and then I remembered that we wrote down everything back then.
> I use a lot of moleskine notebooks and Mead comp books, which I can buy in bulk online.
Moleskine notebooks are beautiful, but I always felt they were far too expensive. Would love to learn where they can be bought in bulk for a more reasonable price.
I'm a convert to the idea of just having a cup full of Bic Cristal (cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, replaceable, 76 year old design) ball point pens. Whenever I temporarily misplace one, I just grab another from the cup as I find them. When I'm cleaning up, they all go back to the cup. However, his point about how hard you have to push to write is making me reconsider. On the other hand, I'm also not writing 42 inch high stacks of manuscripts like him.
The modern version of this is the Pilot G2. Scatter 'em around everywhere! 80% as good as fountain pens at 1% of the fussiness.
I have a Lamy 2000 (well, more than one...) that I adore for writing anything with any actual length. But I still scatter those G2s around.
I used to be a fan of Zebra Sarasa (retractable, not one of the variations) which I thought was better than the G2, but it wasn't always reliable (maybe they changed something), was more expensive, hard to find in stores (G2 are everywhere though), and accumulates a glob of ink when you draw a line across the page, which ends up wherever you next write something. I happen to have a G2 next to me so I'm testing it for the same problem now, and ended up with a glob somewhere along the long line. I cross things off of todo lists a lot or draw dividers between sections of the page so that happens all the time. Still, it might be a good compromise for the pressure issue for writing sentences.
Not that I'm that price sensitive, it is kind of nice: Sarasa ($2+ each, if you can find it), G2 (~1.25 each), Cristal ($0.10-$0.25 each)
That is why I call good pens like my Fink [1] a thinking tool. I always wonder if it is nature or nurture, but I am sure that writing helps me to think in a straight line.
[1]: https://www.stefanfink.de/en/writing-instruments
- coding without an LLM is also good for your brain
- whose gonna tell it to em?
- dont worry, the long term studies are going to pick this up big time 5 years from now
And the long term studies will show that it’s indeed not good, people will discuss it, and nothing will really change, except that there will be a counter movement, and writing code by hand will become a real craft again.
We also know fast food, alcohol, etc., are bad for you and yet most people do these things. I wouldn't bet on LLM usage going down due to it anytime soon.
I thought the purpose of coding was to produce software, but apparently every action I take should be evaluated on how well it achieves arbitrary brain calisthenics.
Coding manually keeps you focused on irrelevant details. I find people that actually like that cognitive style and try to remain in it for as long as possible insanely unproductive. They'll spend years coding up shit that can be replaced in a month. I've seen it happen multiple times now and I'm getting sick of it. Proper problem decomposition and architecture is everything. Think about your problem domain. Code is just bullshit.
I'm dealing all day with developers incapable of thinking about anything else than "queries", "classes", "structs" and "early returns are bad". Semantics, ontologies, interfaces, abstraction boundaries, problem decomposition: ain't got no time for that.
We got structs to initialize, copy constructors to worry about and header definitions in bloody C++ to deal with! Oh look, you forgot to use Yoda-speak in your conditional, also you initialized two variables instead of one in this completely transient, temporary piece of code that is only run once every two months. Let's talk about this all morning! Because code hygiene is so extraordinarily important. You should definitely worry about each and every line of code. I hear it's "good for the brain".
I wonder if an LLM could just turn my hand-written notes into code, and if so, where this’d land on the brain health spectrum.
> Pains me to say it, but rollerball gel pens are about as good as fountain pens on this front.
This. Don't use pencil or normal ballpoint bell with thick ink. Good gel pens are really good and not that much more expensive.
I've always struggled with writing by hand primarily because I tend to over-tense my grip on a pencil/pen even with an ergonomic grip attached. I learned to touch type pretty early on, so back in school before they let us bring laptops to class I would sometimes "type" notes and imagine the text of them in my head as I typed. This still helped with my retention compared to just listening and making mental connections between the concepts being introduced. Sometimes I would type out the full detailed notes and then by hand write out tiny personal shorthand bullet points that would help me recall the general point.
To this day, if I'm trying to learn something new, I will sometimes "type" on an invisible keyboard if I don't have a pen/paper or a smartphone I can write down specifics on. It doesn't work as well for things like memorizing phone numbers or like support ticket ID numbers, but I've found it helps me ingest knowledge even if it doesn't help as much with raw information the way writing by hand does.
Now all of that said, I have also found, like Neal Stephenson, that a high quality, low friction pen on notebook paper tends to feel the best and produce the least cramping. To this day, when I absolutely need to take handwritten notes, I use a Sharpie Rollerball 0.5 black pen with a small notebook, primarily for D&D (and other TTRPG) prep-work, so that I can recall specifics off the top of my head better while improvising.
> you’re going to get tired faster if your muscles have to exert more force
I like to handwrite, but my right hand gets tired very fast, especially as I got older. I write almost a shorthand style, and it is hard to read, but I value speed of writing things down versus the neatness or readability afterward. The author recommends fountain pen or gel rollerball pen, which I have both tried.
Does anyone have any other advice for preventing fatigue? I've also tried to learn to use my left hand, so I can switch hand when my hand gets tired. But even after months (or years?) of trying, I could never get it to write, or atleast to my satisfaction.
Clench the other fist while writing. This loosens the writing hand. Something in the subconscious releases tension in the other hand. It's a trick I've used with reasonable success and it's immediately effective. It does require a bit of conscious effort, but overall it's a great hack.
If you're willing to try things like non-dominant hand writing, it may be worth learning something like business cursive. Most of the movement is done with your arm, and it was designed for people who had to handwrite all day for their job.
Other posters are providing advice about writing from the shoulder, and writing slower etc which I would agree with. The other thing I would mention is: how tightly do you grasp/hold the pen? Try relaxing the grasp a bit.
(I've noticed this with students I support. In the UK the public exams known as GCSEs and GCEs are written papers, and some adult students who need to take them have similar fatigue problems).
Edit: another poster has mentioned grip
There is a technique where you keep your hand almost still and move the whole arm instead.
https://youtu.be/-F8SA_QySkc?is=z0P7I8loxuHVwKXn
Write slower.
A liquid ink rollerball pen, for example the classic "uni-ball Vision Elite" is even closer to the effortless writing experience of a fountain pen (i.e. with a minimum pressure on the paper), than any gel pen (but gel pens are still much better than traditional ball-point pens, which require an excessive pressure on the paper; fountain pens and liquid-ink rollerball pens need to just touch the paper, almost no pressure needed).
Versus a fountain pen, a liquid-ink rollerball pen has the advantage of being insensitive to orientation (which may be difficult to control if you tire easily) and it is also much more unlikely to dry up when unused.
I do not write so much by hand as to become tired, so for myself I prefer a Japanese fountain pen with a nib that allows variable-width lines, for less boring letter forms, but if the criterion for choosing is the maximum possible comfort then I recommend a liquid-ink rollerball pen, and I have experimented with all kinds of writing implements known to mankind.
Except for using the most comfortable writing tool, there is nothing else to do besides changing the style in which you write, to simplify the hand movements.
Perhaps you should alternate between 2 different styles of handwriting, because they might stress different hand muscles.
I have no idea what style of handwriting you use, but I am not convinced that the kinds of "cursive" handwriting that were taught in many schools are really the least tiring, despite their emphasis on minimizing the number of times when the pen is raised from the paper. Many years ago I have abandoned the kind of writing that I was taught as a child and I have switched to one of the variants of the so-called "Italic" handwriting, which are now promoted in many places and which are a revival of the Aldine letters from the Italy of the 16th century, which have also been the base from which the so-called "Italic" style of the printed typefaces (fonts) had been developed. Such a handwriting has improved readability, but how fast and comfortable it is felt, can vary a lot between people. It works for me, but that does not mean that it would also be the best for others. There are books and on-line tutorials about this.
Perhaps you should just write slower, to avoid fatigue.
Don't hold the pen too tightly. Find a pen and paper combination that doesn't require force to write. Ball point pens on cheap notebook paper are notorious for requiring too much force. On quality paper with a good pen the ink will flow effortlessly because of gravity and capillary action. You will only need a light pressure.
I'm left handed and I never really learned a good grip I could write with. So I've always struggled with handwriting. I also have an essential tremor in my left hand. As I have aged, the tremor has gotten worse. So now, I have to grip tight to minimize the tremor.
I've pretty much given up on handwriting, it's embarrassing to either try to write, or have someone else write stuff for me. I ask my wife to fill stuff out for me all the time, but people probably think that's weird when they see it.
> when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.
I completely agree! Perhaps it's simply for one reason: slowness.
Writing by hand slows down and the brain "breathes", calms down, and the waves of thought flow at their proper pace.
We aren't made to rush always: by slowing down, our brain also has time to better process thoughts and information, one at a time, and each one is given the "time it deserves."
Our brain works best when it's relaxed and has time to make all its connections.
Thinking is, first and foremost, an exercise in slowness.
(ps: I'm also left-handed, I wonder if this also affects the functioning of the brain...).
This was my personal trick at the university. I was writing down all the notes during classes, even at the ugliest of my handwriting, but after classes insat down and rewrote the whole Notes in a better and clear way, so I was directly storing information in my brain.
I just needed to re-read the better notes 1 or 2 times and I could already recall the information, even at distance of time.
I write by hand to hack my productivity.
I buy nice notebooks and nice pens that are satisfying to use. I practice my handwriting, so the finished work is satisfying to look at. I think it gives me a bit of dopamine boost.
I'm curious about everyone's opinion on writing "by hand" with a stylus on tablets like the Remarkable, Kindle Scribe, iPad+Pencil, etc.
I like sketching and outlining with pencil and paper, but my handwritten notes are often illegible and disorganized. I know it's partly process and my poor penmanship, but digital surfaces compensate for this with built-in organization, searchability, and easier integration into projects and knowledge bases.
I tried for years to make handwriting on the iPad work, but it never clicked for me. I randomly encountered a reMarkable Paper Pro Move recently, instantly purchased it. For the first time in my life, I no longer tote a paper notebook with me. The software, simplicity, low-latency, form factor, writing feel, everything is absolutely perfect for me.
My handwriting is roughly legible on paper (but getting worse). It is the same on an iPad+pencil with a Paperlike screen cover. It was impossible to read on my Remarkable 2 - the resolution just isn’t there for me.
I think it’s important to have that friction between the stylus and the screen. And if you have that, I am pretty happy with notes on either my iPad or paper.
I found the Paperlike to be worse than the iPad screen alone, but I've been happy with the Astropad Rock Paper Pencil as it comes with a replacement tip for the Apple Pencil that has a metal tip and generates some noticeable friction.
I think tablet handwriting is fine. I had some six weeks of down time a while back and took advantage of it to go through the Getty-Dubay book Write Now: the Getty-Dubay Program for Handwriting Success to improve my handwriting legibility. There's a website now https://handwritingsuccess.com/ and for your purposes even more relevant, there's a mobile app. I'm not affiliated, in case you're wondering.
As for disorganization, that's kind of the nature of early notes. There are ways to kind of organize them. One technique I use is writing them on notecards or notecard-sized paper, which I can later shuffle and organize.
I keep a handwritten journal and write in script. My penmanship isn't great, but it's good enough.
For exams in my intro programming classes, I allow students to bring a handwritten notes sheet if they wish. I get anything from a few sentences to a sheet so full of writing it almost looks gray. From what I can tell, students who really put effort into their notes sheet look at it less frequently but tend to score higher. This tracks with the studies I've seen on handwritten notes.
It's ironic that the article that caused him to write this post (https://substack.com/@justindeschamps/note/c-261265212?utm_s...) is written by AI.
I see this style of informational writing all over the place now.
I hated paper until I found a decent pen (frixion erasable, mediocre) and paper (Lemome grid notebook, very good). It's still harder than typing, but I've found nothing better for thinking through challenging problems.
I still hand write a lot of code, and especially when starting out on projects or making more fundamental changes. I find it leads to better architectural solutions. My thinking has been that writing it out by hand can be slower so my brain is incentivized to think through the options and come up with more concise solutions. But maybe, as the article suggests, there are other small factors to hand-writing that lead to an improvement as well. I also use then go through the hand-written code to "execute" programs in my head and I think this also leads to higher-quality code. I encourage anyone that wants to be genuinely good at programming and software engineering to give it a try.
> Removing friction by using a hard stylus on glass will actually make the process more tiring.
Well since I've never written with a fountain pen, and the type of paper I write on with the fountain pen matters, I'm probably better off picking up the habit with an ipad or the like.
From the source paper:
> Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning
I would also be interested in whether the parts lighting up are actually contributing to learning the task at hand. The 2024 paper quoted above didn't mention a test for comprehension. The prior Stanford experiment also reasoned that writing helped with comprehension because students were forced to summarize.
I'd like to see an experiment that forces both groups, typing and writing, to summarize while their brains are scanned. I'd also like to see results from tests for comprehension for each group. I feel like that would make a stronger case for whether the benefit from writing is actually worth it.
For last few months, whenever I am trying to understand a difficult problem or a concept or addressing a complex issue at work or in relationships, I try to write one page by hand. Often it brings clarity or surfaces the core confusion/misunderstanding. I don't know why that works but it has been really useful.
I agree with the content of the post.
It does feel like a post stating things that are obvious, were someone not blinded by technology.
Curious if others have noticed a trend of going back to "old school" methods, once there is research etc around it. Seems like you can have just not used the new flashy thing.
> Being left handed is fine
As a lefty, I would rather never write another word then twist my hand the way he's doing (above the current line) to avoid the smudges.
I wrote this reply by hand and then used by keyboard which is connected with my mac mini using Bluetooth to type it here so you guys can see it.
"I write all my notes and letters by hand and I started writing them like 2 months ago when I was researching on something and found out the benefits of writing by hand. My post went mega viral on X (@ihteshamali) you will see it here on X and it got like 120k likes and people really loved it. And most people said they will now turn back to writing by hand which is nice."
As some have noted, if you like writing by hand for all of the benefits listed in this article but also want a digital copy for search, taking a photo and having an LLM read your handwriting works really well.
To streamline this process I wrote an iOS app that does exactly this. I used it to digitize my handwritten diaries, but it works for any handwritten paper.
https://inksightful.app/
I am really trying to get everything digital. But I much prefer writing by hand, especially when doing math. I got Samsung s10+ and have 2 problems: the pen is too damn small and my handwriting sucks for recognition so it's mostly PDFs for now instead of fully digitized. Anyone have similar problems with solution?
"Writing by hand is good for your brain", but it does not say the habit or behavior can help you achieve some success, many achievements, especially the more significant ones need a complicated system and long-term hard work (remember 10000 hours theory?)
i'm not totally sold on writing prose by hand. it's still a little too uncomfortable for me. but, for doing mathematics or memorizing things, i have specific rituals built around handwriting that i finally figured out how to make work quite well. i have funny hard requirements though: a) clean, white printer sheets only, absolutely no lines, they are distracting b) mechanical pencils only c) a flat, hard, stable and clear writing surface is a must d) a real eraser must be available
my technique for memorizing things involves a handwritten spatiotemporal reproduction from memory (put everything in the same place on the page in the same order) with spaced repetition that exploits sleep cycles. took me forever to figure it out, but once i did things like exams that build on toolboxes of rote memorization became a lot easier!
i guess i should also mention that i have long had an interest in reproducing the causal nature of handwriting for composing text on the computer. things like write only editors that attempt to encourage that same sort of causal flow.
today I posted a show HN that got insta-flagged by an AI detector. I had written the post then gone back and forth with claude, getting to a refined version I thought was much better. claude said it would hit way better with hn (me?).
after getting flagged I found the original, reposted, and it is actually so much better. not polished, not a masterpiece, I'm nowhere close to a professional writer. But it's like a human story with the marks of human care.
i fear my brain's getting smoothed down by reading all the generation and I need to drop the AI crutch for a while, at least for copy/writing.
Your brain _is_ getting smoothed by this behavior. Don't use AI for writing or your thinking will suffer.
Of course Claude told you its version would land better, that's what how it is trained, but that doesn't make it true.
I hand write my notes so that I don't have to find them again when I need to remember them. I used to study the same way - just summarize everything I'm reading into hand written notes, maybe read them once more before the test if I had time, and pass the test. It's nice to see that my successful practice is now backed by research.
Does anyone here handwrite a blog? I've been thinking about doing that, but I'd be interested in how people accomplish it. Personally, I'd like this to be a hobby that gets me away from screens, so I'm looking to focus more on handwriting and minimize how much I'd need to interact with a digital device.
"Paper Website" seems appealing, but I haven't tried it yet: https://paperwebsite.com/
Not a blog, but I handwrite presentation slides sometimes. And, of course, pages of notes. I use my ReMarkable 2 for that, so it's pretty easy to import to desktop and run scripts.
I've done Julia Cameron's "morning pages" exercise off and on over the years, write three full pages of flow of consciousness by hand first thing in the morning, and it's shocking how good it is for unlocking ideas and working through problems when done consistently.
I have always found interesting that we thing as equivalent "different parts of the brain light up" and "good for the brain". I say this as someone who has an tiny knowledge of neuroscience, but wouldn't you want sometimes to have low brain activity, for certain things?
Having the brain making more connexions and using more resources to do the same thing could be seen, from one point of view, as waste ?
Not that I disagree with the article, of course. Test results speak for themselves, but for example, when I am writing stories, do I need to "better remember" them, or do I need to go faster through my first draft ? (3 years and counting at the moment...wish me luck !)
dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004202
> It might then seem reasonable to think that writing with a stylus on an iPad or similar would be best, since no force is needed and friction is minimized. I don’t think this is true. A small amount of friction is actually desirable.
I find digital handwriting quite pleasant and almost better than writing on paper. Friction is indeed an issue, but you can just buy a dedicated screen protector to address this problem.
Yeah especially for doing math, I've found it's really helpful that I can just select some equations I wrote and shift them down (or insert more space). It helps with adding derivations or additional notes after the fact.
However I'm considering moving back to handwritten notebooks for some things, purely due to the simplicity (no worry about battery life, technical issues, or the difficulty in switching back and forth between my book reader and my notes app).
I have been thinking about that with regards to the new generation, I forget where but I saw a YouTube video interviewing Gen Alpha and how they couldn't recognize calligraphy texts.
I was sad, of course, but at the same time, it made me think if their brain is just being shaped differently. Could it be that this sort of thesis "writing = good" applies to us because we belong to a generation that had our formative memories shaped through that activity?
Is there something inherent to writing that makes it good or is it just a consequence because we did things that way?
When learning new languages, frameworks, or systems, I've learned over the last ten years that I -- as ADHD riddled as I am -- retain and engage with information a lot more when I write by hand, even if I am not medicated.
I know this is true and all but I think a lot of people never really write anything anyways. Texting, random notes, emails. Strange to say but it feels kind of hipster and performative with the technology we have, which kind of makes it hard to enjoy. What I mean is I understand the theory but never have a chance to implement it or even want to.
Somewhat related, I've seen more and more colleges now banning devices in class and reverting to handwritten notes and exams only, presumably due to AI. When I went to college this was actually already done, where many professors, even for CS, made you write code by hand. And it's true, it actually helps you reason better when writing it down over typing it.
When i was in college, we wrote a lot of C code in those blue notebooks. And this is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, which is probably why I don't totally didn't hate whiteboard coding tests. And when I'm trying to work with a new programming language or tool, I'm usually writing things out by hand (helps with the memory, like the article referenced).
I’d like to point out that basically all education research is only partially reproducible or not reproducible at all. So even though this study says it’s good for your brain. Have some skepticism.
I like writing by hand and now it’s easier than ever to just take a picture and give it to an LLM for a transcription if you need it on your phone/computer. Small local models work well for this too.
Well, sorry but look at the methodology on this. The study the post leans on did not study learning. 36 adults went around copying familiar words, and their "typing" is key presses using one index finger (!).
I'm afraid this one's close to going down the replication crisis whirlpool. According to Sol:
"Direct replications found no reliable learning advantage, while a 2024 meta-analysis found only a *small* handwriting benefit but a far larger typing advantage in information captured."
Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” by Abraham E. Flanigan and colleagues, published in Educational Psychology Review on July 12, 2024
This is why I use a reMarkable tablet for my notes. I noticed a few years ago that when I wrote down my notes I actually remembered them more easily. Something about the hand/brain connection helped etch my thoughts more deeply.
I still use Apple Notes, but more as a place to store copy/paste info I want to save or checklists. But for meeting or game design notes? Writing those down 100%.
The Remarkable tablet is so close to what I want. I just wish it was 13".
My iPad is 13" and having a a display about the same size as a sheet of A4/letter paper is nice. It's so nice to have a full size display for marking up pdfs.
Now that I've gotten used to the iPad with Goodnotes, I'm not sure I'd get a 13" Remarkable. I'd probably buy one, but I suspect their notes app would be enough of a downgrade that I would probably return it.
How is the remarkable at converting handwritten notes into text? Especially so that you can search over it? Yeah, I used to handwrite my notes on paper back in the day, and still do for a couple of important topics, but switched over to putting things in Evernote several years ago. The reason is actually do need to do searches over them quite often, and it’s obviously very difficult to do with handwritten documents.
It does a pretty good job. But to be honest I don't use that feature often. I also have the keyboard for it but don't use that often, either. I really mainly use it as a notebook.
I don't know about reMarkable but LLMs are good at recognizing handwriting from photos. I wrote an iOS app to do this for my handwritten diaries, but it works for any handwritten paper: https://inksightful.app/
I'd rather learn a language than write with a pen. In my life at least, writing with a pen is now depreceated. Maybe writing left handed would be worth it but I can't think of another good reason to bring it back.
Why would I ride my bicycle anywhere when I have a car?
Probably one of the best interview questions that I've been asked over the years, is to write a script (can't remember the purpose) in bash, using pen and paper.
Really made me think hard.
I like handwriting, but it struggles when you need to copy it in your obsidian
Rocketbook has some products that promise to help with this here. I've tried them and found them high friction but it might be worth it to you.
There's also the pens that use cameras and special papers like livescribe (I think?) but I didn't love those either.
Take a pic of the pages, extract text.
I just take a photo and let an LLM transcribe it
"Sure, doing X the old-fashioned way is slow, inefficient, and inconvenient in a hundred minor and major ways - but haven't you considered that it might, on an incredibly shaky connection with low effect sizes and uncertain causality, be better than your brain?"
Sorry, but no. I trust that "the Old Way is just Better in an invisible, unproven way" about as much as I trust any other "appeal to tradition".
I like Neal Stephenson's writing, but I wouldn't take this advice seriously.
> Don’t worry about conserving paper
The best suggestion, thank you
I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.
It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.
In my first job, my supervisor gave me a Day Timer binder and set of pages for it and I very dependent on it within a few weeks. That thing was always with me and I was a little terrified that I would leave it somewhere. If I were hit by a bus and they gave that book to my replacement, they would have no problem picking up where I left off.
Then I got a series of Palm Pilot devices and left the paper behind. It worked pretty well for me and the grafitti handwriting system was ingenious. Aside from my contact list being duplicated a few times a year, I didn't really have any negative experiences.
Then smart phones hit and even though they can do everything any electronic organizer ever did for me, I've never been as happy with them.
I'm seriously considering buying a paper planner again. Shared calendars is the only thing blocking me.
I love Obsidian too, but for me it's just a place where I park notes for future reference. I don't actively use it.
Writing by hand has some advantages and writing by keyboard also has some advantages. Using note-taking app or similar software is very convenient and useful in some situations.
I have had, and continue having, way above average use for my handwriting. It works for all sorts of math, quick diagrams on anything from geometric reasoning to electronics, composing tricky fragments of text, taking notes on something I'm doing that requires a myriad of easy-to-forget details, and so on.
But my 1st grade teacher and my 1st to 12st year classes variously agreed on how atrocious my handwriting was. Famously, my 1st grade teacher told my parents, "there's no hope". She was right. And, four decades later, it irks me to no end that every time I grab a pen and start writing, the ghosts come to look over my shoulder and judge. "Look at it, he's at it again. That 'f' looks like anything but... That's not a proper uppercase 'I'... you could summon a demon with it, but it would be a pitiful one. That 'g' is vicious. Is that a '1', a '3' or a '7'? Didn't we fail you enough times in basic arithmetic for that? Also, that line of text is sagging as much as your sitting, boy..."
not only writing, but drawing, art, putting a pen or pencil to paper/tablet and just flowing is great to keep the brain muscle active.
I <3 Stephenson's earlier works: Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and even the lesser stuff (the university one, In the Beginning There Was the Command Line, etc.) were all incredibly well written, and I'd strongly recommend them.
But Cryptonomicon started to go in the wrong direction (though it was still good), and after that he completely lost me by writing 1000 page books that require you to learn half of an entirely new language he made up! His success seems to have made him completely lose the magic (of writing well) that he once had.
As such, I'd take any advice he gives with a mountain of salt. It's like getting advice from a "has been" former athlete: it might be good advice from their glory days, or it might just be junk they spew in their obsolescence.
Me too. I love Snow Crash and re-read it recently. I started Cryptonomicon, but didn't even get 1/4th before giving up.
I swear, early on he wrote well, which means he wrote 1000 pages and edited them down to a normal book.
Once he got popular I imagine he was like "I'm popular, screw that editing stuff, I'm just publishing every word I write" ... and that is not how you make a good book.
Here’s my question, what if the writing looks like handwriting?
Great advice. Didn't know Neal is left-handed.
Neal, if you're reading this, will you ever visit Germany on a book signing tour?
i like writing by hand, and definitely generate better content / thoughts. I don't like going back through my writing and putting it in electronic form (an no writing on an electronic device (ipad/remarkable etc.) doesn't is not a substitute).
This applies to code as well, except, typing, instead of generating
More like old habits go hard - heh
Always boggles my mind that some people can't write cursive. So you write each letter one by one?
Sort of. For most letters, my print strokes are the same motion as cursive (except r and s) but lifting up the pen between letters/strokes. Even when I was practiced in cursive, I never felt like it added any time to lift and lower the pen, any more than the time it already took to move the pen to the right, but doing so improved legibility. Its not like I'm consciously thinking about each letter, unlike caligraphy or drafting block print.
I haven't written cursive in many years, i should try it again but since i'm out of practice i find it takes more time to write than going print. Which of course does lead to hand cramps etc
You need to practice it. It's a survival skill. You'll never know when you'll need it.
I'm almost 30 and I haven't run into a "survival situation" where I needed cursive.
I would hazard a guess it falls below knowing Spanish but above folding origami cranes.
No, definitely not. Although it depends where you are. If you are near South America etc, then Spanish would be useful to know.
I have used it before when I've lost a phone etc, or if I had no way of contacting someone otherwise. I can think of more dramatic situations too. Technology can be helpful but if you're overreliant on it then that is a potential weakness.
Yes. When I write cursive and want to be able to read after myself I need to write very slowly and deliberately.
All my childhood I optimized my cursive writing for speed. Most teachers I had only valued note taking, not thinking about what is written.
I connect letters that are easy to connect and pick up my pen on others. Anything that flows into the next, cursive. Anything where you have to contort and lead in or out with fiddly little bits and then just write the letter anyhow, I just skip all that and write it plain.
Ummm, yes. Especially for those of us who may have had less than ideal schooling.
I'm surprised he didn't mention editing. On a computer this is trivial; on paper you need an ink eradicator, correction tape, or correction fluid. And even those are only good for small corrections. If you want to insert a sentence or paragraph somewhere, that's not really possible with paper.
Also, if you want your text to be published online or printed, it needs to be digitized somehow. Which is a good OCR tool for handwriting, especially if it's not very legible? Just feed scans into Gemini perhaps?
Agreed. As someone who frequently rearranges the structure and order of sentences as I go, I don't even know how to attempt writing by hand. It would be a complete mess. I expect that the common refrain would be wait until the second draft to make such rearrangements, but it's often the bones of the story I'm trying to set properly, and if the bones are broken, there's nothing for the meat to dangle upon.
But maybe it's different for me, since I write nonfiction?
I suspect it's because Stepenson stopped editing his work a long time ago.
He used to write a ton and edit it down to a normal-sized book, but once he got popular he just decided to (seemingly) publish everything he wrote, without editing.
>Use cursive
Any good resources to learn cursive?
What if I told you writing in all caps is even better for your brain.
> If the pen’s ink reservoir is partly empty, so that it contains an air bubble, and if it’s positioned nib down, then, when you go up in an airplane, the bubble will expand as the ambient pressure drops, forcing ink out the nib. Once I figured that out, I got in the habit of making sure my pens were positioned nib up when taking off in an airplane. If I have time I’ll also refill the pen before departure, to minimize the size of the air bubble.
Finally! this was one of those things that bothered me for many years, but not enough to spend time to research :) . Thank you!!
Yes, I've had to learn this one the hard way, too. And more than once, I have to admit.
Do crosswords count?
I'm a huge fan of N.S. and what he says might be true, but I have an aversion to writing by hand after being tortured while growing up in the late 80s.
I just couldn't seem to hold a pen or pencil the right way and would always fall behind following along with the rest of the class. I was forced to spend hours at home with worksheets tracing over letters. I was led to believe that if I couldn't write properly I would be a complete failure.
It turns out being able to use a computer and type quickly was a more useful skill.
I don't think that the research is as conclusive as the article makes it out to be ( I know he links ).
I would consider this: maybe useful, do it if you find it entertaining.
I mean, I love writing with fountain pen and I do it every day, but I have _read_ Anathem.
Hello fellow Anathem reader, there's doesn't seem to be many of us
Something is seriously wrong with an author when they think they need to invent an entire new language (and force the reader to learn half of it) just for a book. ENGLISH IS A PERFECTLY FINE LANGUAGE, AND EVERY GREAT WORK OF ENGLISH WAS WRITTEN USING IT!
Stephenson was my literally my favorite author, but when I got to Anathem I was like fuck this pompous asshat and his made up language BS: I'm sticking to authors who write in English.
Anathem is the best Stephenson book; The Algebraist is the best Iain Banks. There's enough of us to fill a good sized van!
Remember when serious debugging meant at least an inch of greenbar?
Decent article.
No notes.
Great!
> I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that,
Aaaaaand time to tune out.
The rest of that sentence:
> I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm.
Do you think he needs to be a neuroscientist to make this claim?
The non-sequiturs that follow do.
Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy. Perverse incentives exist in every domain, and you cannot discount the human factor. The experts can be wrong.
And in this case, Van der Meer's experiment showing more "elaborate" brain activity during handwriting was correlational. The conclusion that this leads to better learning outcomes does not follow.
More to your point: calling "appeal to authority" does not license argument from ignorance. Furthermore, appeal to authority only refers to an authority who is not authoritative in the domain in question.
I don't think this is appeal to authority (or the reverse, I guess). Neuroscience is complex, being a scientist/doctor is one signal that the observations here would be based on/reflective of a large body of knowledge. Probably GP's unstated point is that the author isn't a scientist/doctor and they also haven't studied/read up on their own either.
The experts in the sciences usually back their claims up using citations, and can be disproven through the normal methods of disproving citations. not through "vibes"
And he said "I'm not an expert" just after citing evidence.
Except that he didn't actually cite evidence that supported his claim. He merely reposted a blog's incorrect conclusion.
You've been downvoted to oblivion, but I figured I'll use you as a meat shield since there isn't a single other reply of criticality here AFAICT.
The study talks about connections and frequency, but that seems like a very coarse measure for something as complex as the brain.
> Increased connectivity within the theta (3.5–7.5 Hz) and alpha (8–12.5 Hz) frequency bands has been linked to mechanisms underlying sensorimotor integration (). As increased connectivity in the brain was observed only when writing by hand and not when simply pressing keys on the keyboard, our findings can be taken as evidence that handwriting promotes learning.
Can you? The linked paper appears to be stating association, not causation.
The alternative hypothesis is that the brain activates more because writing by hand is harder, and that by writing by hand you just get better at writing by hand.
My thought is, write in whichever medium you feel you work best in. Maybe try them both. And if you're not productive maybe don't use that medium.
This feels like a lot of grasping to try to justify some retroism (why does it need justification?).
This is a fair response and I think would be a good top level comment, you don't need a meat shield. The reason the parent was downvoted was that it isn't criticism, it's just a declaration that they didn't read the article.
There are a lot of citations in the paper backing up the idea that handwriting promotes learning, though (or at least spelling, memory, recall, and letter recognition/understanding). It reads to me like an attempt to explain an observed phenomenon: "given that handwriting appears to promote learning, what could be a mechanism for that?" It isn't in a vacuum just claiming that "these brain signals clearly prove that learning is happening".
The "general discussion" section also covers why the specific connectivity they looked at might be related to learning.