Image Credits: Aaron Burden (Unsplash)
Although I am an ancient postgraduate student, I am not quite old enough to remember a lecture hall devoid of laptops. The sound of keyboards clacking seems a natural accompaniment to a professor’s presentation. The soft rumble of hundreds of fingers furiously typing away was the ominous ambient soundtrack to my university contact hours.
But in the final year of my undergraduate degree, I enrolled in a course that disallowed the use of any computer, tablet or phone. The lecturer had been teaching this class for almost 15 years, and he had witnessed the turn of the screen-age. He saw first-hand the slow transformation of his class full of attentive students into a sea of monitors. Hair down to his shoulders, always clutching a beaten copy of some post-modern philosopher’s polemics, his lectures were entirely made up of him talking.
He spoke and we wrote what he said down. We scribbled at first, in a desperate attempt to transcribe his sentences word-for-word. After a few weeks, our wrists could just about keep up.
We were present. Without any distraction, I truly learnt from him. There was no tempting Vinted tab open on my screen, no New York Times mini-game to dip into when I lost interest, no copying-and-pasting from the lecture slides – only his words and my pen.
The notes I produced in this class were written by hand. A true document, not made up of zeroes and ones. My experience of the class is embodied within the notebook. Perhaps the physicality of the act of writing creates a stronger memory, for I can almost hear his strong Czech accent still.
Image Credits: Unseen Studio (Unsplash)
The evidence for handwritten notes goes further than my semester with an eccentric Eastern European professor (think Slavoj Zizek with slightly less sniffing!). The benefits have been proven by science. Research shows that it can boost memory retention, enhance comprehension, and even boost creativity. Writing by hand makes you engage more fully with the content you’re learning, as you’re forced to rephrase and think, rather than copy and paste.
There are certainly limits to the written form. It can get messy. My right hand is an inky mess; I have been betrayed by my ballpoint. Try as I might, I can’t scrawl out a perfect font. But I will not let the keyboard warriors win.
There is no typeface like your own handwriting, so shut your laptops and get your stationery out.
