[troyastorino]

I’ve had mixed success typing things verbatim vs hand writing verbatim.

When learning to program, I found typing out code samples had a similar effect to writing them out by hand, and felt more natural to the domain. But in other subjects in school, it felt like my comprehension was lower when I typed lecture notes instead of handwriting them. I was never sure whether that was something inherent to hand writing vs typing or it was just because I had more of a barrier between typing and thinking than I did with handwriting.

It always seemed clear that the value of writing something verbatim was that it forced your brain to internalize it in a way you don’t need to when reading. It takes longer to hand write than to type — maybe that is the value of hand writing vs typing? Or when typing I needed to think more about the act of typing, whether that was thinking about formatting/positioning or just being less natural than handwriting? Maybe programming is just a special case where you always think through typing?

I lean towards thinking it’s somewhat domain specific. Clearly with physics or math if you had to typeset equations with LaTeX that would get in the way, and typing would be a barrier to understanding. With programming, every idea is expressed through typing, and so typing is a natural way to imprint ideas on your brain.

[selwynii]

It's actually really interesting that you mentioned physics and math - I used to typeset my lecture notes in LaTeX and I found it more effective to do it for exactly the same reasons you mentioned. The time it took to typeset equations forced me to figure out what those equations were saying.

I suspect it's time to digest the concepts and when it's slower to handwrite versus type that results in better comprehension.

[bigfudge]

There are studies (I don’t know how good - this is a second hand account of a conference talk) that suggested using difficult to read typefaces or deliberately degrading texts by photocopying multiple times helped retention. Perhaps writing in awkward forms is a similar effect.

[szarnyasg]

Maybe they meant this paper?

Daniel Oppenheimer et al.: Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wd1s7hj

"Study 1 found that harder to read fonts led to increased retention in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to real-world classroom environments."

I'm not an expert on this topic, so I don't know whether this result was replicated since. If it indeed works, then kudos to my university's physics department for making use of this effect - they had a habit of handing out physics cheat sheets and various MATLAB code snippets that have been photocopied for 15+ years from one copy to another.

[nicoburns]

Yeah, interestingly I tend to pause and think rather than taking notes, and I’ve often found that’s more effective for me because I can spend more time thinking, and less time an the mechanics of writing.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I have a similar experience. Programming is best learned by typing, but not good for example, materials science notes, those were better written out by hand.

For some of my undergrad courses we were allowed a 'cheat sheet' which is a single 8.5"x11" sheet of paper that we could write anything we wanted on and could bring in to the exam. It became a skill to carefully put an entire course's worth of information on a single sheet. But for me, interestingly, once I had made this sheet I rarely referred to it in the test. The act of making it was enough for me to remember most of it.

[narag]

Maybe programming is just a special case where you always think through typing?

For me, yes. It's a question of speed. I type much faster than I can handwrite. For a complex unit of code, it's better for me to dump it as fast as possible so I can hold it in my mental pipeline as a whole.

Long ago, learning touch typing was a huge boost to my programming capacity.

For other stuff, I find it better handwritting so the ideas have the time to sink in. Programming seems a more complex activity.