| HN Mirror

Granted, I don't know that there's not something to the idea of some kind of special benefit or effect that only handwriting has. It does feel meaningful and important in some way. But I more strongly suspect that it's a matter of fluency. If someone types fluently enough that the act itself takes no conscious effort or deliberate attention, then maybe they can engage and form associations comparably well as if they were handwriting. Most people, I think, don't -- that is, even if their typing speed is more than adequate for whatever work they do, I'm guessing it remains a bottleneck in this sense. Handwriting is slower, typically, but I don't mean a speed bottleneck, even though speed is part of the point. I mean something more along the lines of whether the conceptual task at hand enjoys dedicated resources, or has to share mental bandwidth, attentional control, working memory, flow, etc. with the mechanical task. I get the same frustration as you, of course: I don't handwrite painstakingly, but I do it slower than I type for sure. Both are low-effort, but handwriting loses out in terms of speed. If my handwriting and typing speeds were the same, but typing were a higher-effort activity for me, it's then that I suspect handwriting would have the advantage. Then, how much faster can the typing get, while remaining high-effort relative to handwriting, before the speed advantage overcomes the cognitive load advantage?