Mastodawn

@gisiger

I think the efficacy of hand-writing vs. typing it into a form likely depends on how you came to the technologies. As an Xer, hand-writing was all that most of my contemporaries had: I was an outlier and learned to type in elementary school, and, as a result, a lot of the pathways that would have formed for hand-writing formed for typing – either as an "instead" or as an "as well" (kind of like bilingualism).

When I've been places where typing was non-possible (in class for K-12 and college) or in customer-meetings where individual electronic devices weren't allowed), scribbling into a notebook helped with retention. I chose the word "scribbling" because most of what I did was doodle. It always seemed the mere act of putting ink to paper helped with absorbtion, whether what I was scribbling was notes or unrelated images.

Similarly, typing things has a memory-fixing effect for me. It's like, just knowing that I wrote something up helps fix it in my mind. Perhaps its just the deliberateness of taking the time to put something into a blog that fixes it or maybe it's the knowing where I can re-find something does it.

But, I get that that's not normal (particularly for my age-group).

Here's How Handwritten Digital Templates Have Changed My Day