Writing It Down by Hand

Students who take notes by hand tend to do better on later tests of understanding than students typing on a laptop, and the standard explanation is that handwriting is slower. Because you cannot get everything down, you must decide what matters, and deciding what matters is itself the work. The account is attractive and the effect is real, but the explanation has been asked to carry more than it can.

[A] The first difficulty is that the comparison is not between two ways of writing but between two machines, and one of them is connected to everything. Studies that disable the network narrow the gap considerably, which suggests that a good part of the original finding was about attention rather than about handwriting. [B] The second difficulty is more awkward. When typists are instructed to summarise rather than transcribe, the advantage of handwriting largely disappears, which means the mechanism was never the pen at all but the summarising, and that summarising can be requested directly. [C] None of this shows that the original studies were wrong. It shows that a finding about a tool was really a finding about a habit that the tool encouraged, and habits, unlike tools, can be taught. [D] The practical advice that follows is duller than the headline and rather more useful: the instruction matters more than the instrument.