[jll29]

You story about the one pen reminds me of something. My old chemistry teacher gave grades to how orderly people's notes looked. "How it's put on your page, it's in your head," he used to say. At the time, we school kids found it "childish". But empirically, there is some truth to that: it seems I can learn better from clean notes than from sloppy notes, so often I re-wrote things. I was wondering whether that is due to the visual nature of memory, or whether the aesthetically more pleasing appearance of the cleanly re-written notes perhaps increased motivation.

[JohnMakin]

Good point, I think the reason it helped me was I could trust what I had written down a lot more as following a clean line of thought I had become reasonably certain of - which had the effect of speeding me up because i wasn’t looking back in some chicken scratch sprawl and trying to find whatever weird assumption I had made somewhere. It still would happen in pen sometimes, but, a lot less, and if it did, the error was much more blatant and easier to find.