[denali53]

I've always found that note-taking by hand in school and university (implicitly through cursive, because I would find writing out in block letters way too tedious) - to really help recall and understanding, even if I was writing down what I hear by wrote. Have never had the same feeling typing out the same way into a laptop (which is what I now do at work) - that ends up more as a data-filing exercise.

[mig39]

In education, that's called "multiple means of representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even more.

I take handwritten notes all the time, but rarely have to refer back to them.

[Wowfunhappy]

> In education, that's called "multiple means of representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even more.

However, that doesn't explain why the effect is stronger for handwriting vs typing.

My personal belief is that this is learned behavior, ie most of us were taught to take notes by hand at an early age and that leads to brain treating them a certain way.

[tomjakubowski]

Yeah, same. Very rarely return to my notes. Writing the note and maybe glancing back at it a few times "in the moment" is enough to help with retention later on.

[nytesky]

In high school I would take hand written history notes and then type them up at night (I was a touch typists in the 90s when it was relatively rare — today’s kid type blinding fast).

This gave me a really amazing recall for the notes, and often times I would type with my fingers in the air to recall passages.

In college we had far more material and I could do this multi mode note taking and I think my performance suffered for it.