Do Not Type Your Notes

I feel it nec­es­sary to make it clear who I am speak­ing to. First and fore­most, I am speak­ing to any­one who is con­sid­er­ing switch­ing to a typed note-tak­ing sys­tem for school. If you al­ready value hand­writ­ten notes, none of what I say will likely ap­ply to you.

For the last two years, I’ve typed my notes. It has worked well for me. Really well. For a time, I be­lieved that it gave me a leg-up com­pared to my peers who hand­wrote their notes. I still think that is true, for that spe­cific con­text. A con­text I no longer re­side in.

This ar­ti­cle is also a re­flec­tion. I will re­turn to the fact that any kind of note-tak­ing is a per­sonal, cus­tomized process. I want to look back at what worked, why, and why it does­n’t work any­more.

In his books, Cal Newport has rec­om­mended to stu­dents tak­ing non-tech­ni­cal courses to type their notes. This is for a num­ber of rea­sons. For one, typ­ing is pretty much uni­ver­sally faster than hand­writ­ing, to the point that some be­lieve it was a ma­jor eco­nomic ad­van­tage to cul­tures who spoke lan­guages with smaller char­ac­ter sets. If I can write down more in­for­ma­tion, I will have a bet­ter record of the lec­ture, and thus an eas­ier time study­ing later. If I was tak­ing his­tory, cre­ative writ­ing, psy­chol­ogy, or busi­ness, and I in­ten­tion­ally para­phrase all my notes, I can paste them into my es­say out­line and use it as a frame­work. Fur­ther, get­ting good at $\LaTeX$ and edit-fo­cused text ed­i­tors like NeoVim, I found I could dec­i­mate my re­vi­sion time.

Unfortunately, this only ap­plies to hu­man­i­ties classes. If you are fo­cused on any of the classes men­tioned above, this ar­ti­cles does­n’t ap­ply to you.

It’s Hard to Keep Up

Yes. I just said that typed notes al­lows me to record more in­for­ma­tion. This is true for hu­man­i­ties classes that are work­ing pri­mar­ily in English. This is not true for tech­ni­cal classes that are work­ing pri­mar­ily in math no­ta­tion.

Pretty much the only way to re­li­ably record math­e­mat­i­cal ex­pres­sions is via $\LaTeX$. Sound sim­ple? No.

An Example

You can per­form ideal gas com­pu­ta­tions us­ing the for­mula $PV=nRT$PV = nRT. If you want to find the to­tal weight of a gas given the vol­ume, tem­per­a­ture and pres­sure, you can re­arrange to form the ex­pres­sion $\frac{PV}{RT} * \text{molecular weight} = \text{total weight}$.

So far these ex­pres­sions have been pretty sim­ple. The one above looks like:

\frac{PV}{RT} * \text{molecular weight} = \text{total weight}

Using a com­bi­na­tion of manic typ­ing and LuaSnip short­cuts, I can man­age to gen­er­ate the for­mu­las dur­ing the lec­ture with a lit­tle time to spare. Once you start plug­ging in val­ues, how­ever, it gets dif­fi­cult.

If we are look­ing at hy­dro­gen, and we use val­ues of $V = 27.0 \text{ liters}$, $P = 755 \text{ torr}$, and $T = 31.3 \text{ cel­sius}$, the full ex­pres­sion looks like:

$$\frac{(27.0)(\frac{755}{760})}{(31.3 + 273.15)(0.08206)} \times (2.016) = 2.16$$

If that still looks sim­ple to you, take a look at the $\LaTeX$:

\frac{(27.0)(\frac{755}{760})}{(31.3 + 273.15)(0.08206)} * (2.016) = 2.16

There are two sep­a­rate prob­lems here.

1. The $\LaTeX$ is not quite self de­scrib­ing. In or­der to get a good grasp of what it rep­re­sents, I have to ren­der it out to ei­ther HTML or in a pdf.
2. It is ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult to write and re­vise. Even with snip­pets and a good grasp of the key­board, even mi­nor ed­its are la­bo­ri­ous.

The net re­sult: lec­tures be­come manic, un­suc­cess­ful at­tempt at repli­cat­ing the chalk­board in $\LaTeX$, not an ac­tual learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

Computers are Distracting

I’ve spo­ken on the neg­a­tive ef­fects of so­cial me­dia be­fore. Need­less to say, so­cial me­dia has a sig­nif­i­cant ef­fect on aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance across the board. An enor­mous pile of sci­en­tific ev­i­dent has proven that re­duc­ing so­cial me­dia use makes you a hap­pier, health­ier, more pro­duc­tive hu­man be­ing. Tak­ing notes on the same de­vice I use for en­ter­tain­ment is a recipe for dis­trac­tion. This is why I don’t like iPads.

There are dis­trac­tions on lap­tops too. I found my­self Googling my ques­tions in­stead of ask­ing the pro­fes­sor. Email was con­stant dis­tur­bance, in­ter­rupt­ing at what seemed like the most op­por­tune time. If I had a stray thought about any of my side pro­jects, I in­vari­ably found my­self work­ing on them in­stead of par­tic­i­pat­ing in the lec­ture.

These are ex­treme ex­am­ples, and they did­n’t oc­cur of­ten, but when they did, they were sig­nif­i­cant.

Customize

Books like Deep Work by Cal Newport and The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor claim to be able to help read­ers be­come a hap­pier, more pro­duc­tive in­di­vid­ual. Both books start by ac­knowl­edg­ing that the most suc­cess­ful peo­ple cus­tomize their work strate­gies to what is op­ti­mal for them.

When I asked other mem­bers of the NeoVim com­mu­nity, their re­sponse was pretty sim­i­lar. By cre­at­ing flex­i­bil­ity in my study and work process, I can shift around and find what works best for me. Typed notes do not eas­ily pro­vide this flex­i­bil­ity.

The Flexibility of Handwritten Notes

Personally, when­ever I type my notes, they be­come a form of graph, al­most al­ways a tree.

The above is what I am in­tend­ing to write in my mind. But given that I am work­ing in un­for­mat­ted text, it ends up look­ing like:

# Chinese History

## Warring States Period

### Lao Tzu

This is some information on Lao Tzu

### Confucius

This is some information on Confucius

## Civil Service Exam

The civil service exam was initally based on Confucian values, and resulted in a highly educated government.

While this is a non-tech­ni­cal ex­am­ple, it does well to rep­re­sent the prob­lem I am speak­ing to. With a pen and pa­per, you are phys­i­cally writ­ing out the as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween con­cepts. When typ­ing notes, you must do so lin­guis­ti­cally. When hand­writ­ing notes, you have the op­por­tu­nity to in­clude nav­i­ga­tional com­po­nents. You can phys­i­cally place dif­fer­ent con­cepts in dif­fer­ent places, and in­ter­re­late them sim­i­larly. By tran­scrib­ing your full two-di­menin­sional men­tal map, you are start­ing to uti­lize the parts of your brain nor­mally re­served for nav­i­ga­tion.

I sus­pect this is why re­ten­tion is of­ten so much higher with hand­writ­ten notes. Hu­man nav­i­ga­tional mem­ory is the most ac­cu­rate and long-stand­ing kind. This likely comes down the nav­i­ga­tional chal­lenges of early hunter-gath­er­ers. Sport mem­o­riz­ers in­vari­ably turn to this kind of mem­ory to re­mem­ber long se­quences of seem­ingly mean­ing­less in­for­ma­tion.

By as­so­ci­at­ing the phys­i­cal lo­ca­tion of in­for­ma­tion in my notes with the in­for­ma­tion it­self, I am able to re­tain the in­for­ma­tion more ac­cu­rately.

Final Thoughts

Do I re­gret not switch­ing to hand­writ­ten notes sooner? No. Will I con­tinue typ­ing my notes in hu­man­i­ties classes? Yes.

I know I phrased the ti­tle in a pri­mar­ily in­struc­tive way, but there is only one thing I want you to re­mem­ber: tak­ing notes is an ul­ti­mately per­sonal process. Do what works for you. Similarly, I am just now en­ter­ing what feels like a new world pos­si­bil­ity. It may not end up go­ing as well as I the­o­rize. Ei­ther way, you will hear from me again.