I went through a few related iterations on this personally back when I was in school, and what I found was that I remembered best when it was hard to take notes.
By “hard” I mean there was some active challenge I was trying to overcome at the same time I was taking notes. For example, my retention shot up when I went from taking notes in my math classes on paper to typing them up in LaTeX, I think because it kept me engaged with the material because I kept having to deal with LaTeX while also taking my notes. Once I got good enough at LaTeX I found my retention dropped, mostly because my mind more easily wandered away because writing my notes no longer consumed all of my attention.
I went through a few iterations of this, finding ways to make taking my notes harder. Things I did included:
writing them in French (I only speak French poorly after studying it for 4 years in school)
writing them in unusual scripts
writing them in Sage notebooks
writing them in Mathcad
Eventually I ran out of ways to make taking notes harder. Coincidentally not longer afterwards I dropped out.
The obvious thing this suggests is that any benefit from handwriting notes over typing them likely comes from it being more attention consuming to write by hand. If this is not true, say because you’re learning to touch type while taking notes or you take your in shorthand (handwritten or typed) while learning shorthand, then I expect higher retention using whatever method was personally hardest (most attention consuming) for the person.
Thanks for sharing this! Interestingly, this has not been my experience—when I started taking LaTex notes in live talks / lectures, I think my retention went down because I would get nerd-sniped trying to fix my formatting. However, I do think a similar thing is true for me which is that my retention seems proportionate to my time spent interpreting / thinking about the material, which I could see note-taking difficulty being correlated with. I suspect it’s not for me because I have an above average level need format things in the “optimal” way (this is also why I dislike using pens for writing).
Could the mechanism be that your note-taking rate is limited to a certain number of WPM? One way I think about note-taking is that I need to force my brain to “compress” the information to encode it into my memory, which is easier if I’m forced to actually compress the information by taking notes of a limited size.
I went through a few related iterations on this personally back when I was in school, and what I found was that I remembered best when it was hard to take notes.
By “hard” I mean there was some active challenge I was trying to overcome at the same time I was taking notes. For example, my retention shot up when I went from taking notes in my math classes on paper to typing them up in LaTeX, I think because it kept me engaged with the material because I kept having to deal with LaTeX while also taking my notes. Once I got good enough at LaTeX I found my retention dropped, mostly because my mind more easily wandered away because writing my notes no longer consumed all of my attention.
I went through a few iterations of this, finding ways to make taking my notes harder. Things I did included:
writing them in French (I only speak French poorly after studying it for 4 years in school)
writing them in unusual scripts
writing them in Sage notebooks
writing them in Mathcad
Eventually I ran out of ways to make taking notes harder. Coincidentally not longer afterwards I dropped out.
The obvious thing this suggests is that any benefit from handwriting notes over typing them likely comes from it being more attention consuming to write by hand. If this is not true, say because you’re learning to touch type while taking notes or you take your in shorthand (handwritten or typed) while learning shorthand, then I expect higher retention using whatever method was personally hardest (most attention consuming) for the person.
Thanks for sharing this! Interestingly, this has not been my experience—when I started taking LaTex notes in live talks / lectures, I think my retention went down because I would get nerd-sniped trying to fix my formatting. However, I do think a similar thing is true for me which is that my retention seems proportionate to my time spent interpreting / thinking about the material, which I could see note-taking difficulty being correlated with. I suspect it’s not for me because I have an above average level need format things in the “optimal” way (this is also why I dislike using pens for writing).
Could the mechanism be that your note-taking rate is limited to a certain number of WPM? One way I think about note-taking is that I need to force my brain to “compress” the information to encode it into my memory, which is easier if I’m forced to actually compress the information by taking notes of a limited size.