[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.