Handwriting holds the Power to Make you a Better Reader
How you take notes while you read affects how useful they are | An essay.
I firmly believe that writing by hand will make you a better reader. I refer specifically to writing about what you read with a pen or pencil. In general this essay is geared towards those desiring to engage in higher forms of reading — effectively reading for the sake of understanding what the book is communicating, more so than just enjoying it for the pleasure it provides. This is something I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to myself lately. However, readers who want to read purely for pleasure may still find something of use in the thoughts & experiences I’m going to relay below.
Does Method Matter?
The practice of keeping notes while reading of one kind or another, and reflecting on them, is a common one. I would argue that anyone who advises someone else to take up this practice has offered sound advice. I for one have felt massive benefits from doing so. Where I disagree with much of the advice, regards the method of note taking. The precise method of note-taking employed by a reader — be it digitally or physically — is often regarded as an irrelevant detail. Simply write your notes where-ever it feels natural. It’s true that any notes taken while reading will serve a reader better than none at all — putting up barriers by insisting on a certain methodology also doesn’t help. Still, I would argue the method chosen is not entirely irrelevant. In my experience, writing notes by hand is the best way to get the most out of them. By extension, it’s the best way to get the most out of what you’re reading too. Therefore, it’s worth at least considering.
Finding Focus is Critical
For one thing, handwriting demands focus. I need not wax on about the importance of focus, or go on about how finding focus has been becoming increasingly difficult in our time. Anyone who has picked up a book with the desire to get something out of it knows that nothing happens unless you can focus on it. The same goes for the notes you wish to take about what you’re reading. Writing notes by hand versus typing them out on a computer massively increases my focus because it’s a slower and more deliberate process. It’s a slow and precise enough activity that it’s easier to focus only on what you’re doing as your mind conjures the thoughts and your hand forms the words. You have the time to think about every word more carefully as you write it. Not to mention that a notebook can’t distract the same way that a digital device can. As much as handwriting demands focus, it’s also a vehicle for automatic focus. Once you start, you don’t have to think about focusing — it has a way of drawing you in on its own.
Understanding what you’re Reading through Writing
Writing about what I’m reading by hand also increases the likelihood of my being able to understand it. In order to get words onto a page efficiently you need to become a master at condensing things into language you can write down quickly while keeping the core meaning intact; so that it will still make sense when you go review it later. Let’s say you’re in the middle of an engrossing chapter in a book — you naturally won’t want to put it down. Yet, you come across something on the pages that stands out so much to you, that you’d like to keep it saved for later. Perhaps the idea is long and complex.
If you were to type out the excerpt along with your thoughts on it, you might be able to get down entire blocks of the book verbatim for later reflection very quickly. On the surface this looks impressive — it looks like extremely detailed note taking. If you can manage however to condense the idea you want to save into a couple of sentences capable of being written down speedily with a pen, the chances are much higher that you’ll come to understand what stood out to you more quickly. The ability to repeat something doesn’t require understanding. The ability to put something into your own words does.
This goes back to the commonly repeated — in my experience true — notion that if you can take something complex and break it into simple terms, you’ve understood it. How to Read a Book by: Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren touches on this idea much more eloquently than I can manage. In plain terms, if you can describe something that stood out to you in a couple of short sentences, the odds are you’ve got the gist of it.
Remembering What you Read
Finally, something that has been written down by hand is much more easily remembered. Of course, if you’re like me, reading is about much more than just remembering what you read and being able to repeat it. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll never come across things while reading that you’d like to hold on to. Writing by hand has been proven by numerous studies to accelerate the process by which the brain moves something from the working memory to the long-term memory. How precisely this works goes somewhat beyond the scope of this essay — needless to say, many more parts of the brain are activated by hand writing than by typing. From my own experience I know that things I’ve written down by hand stick with me, even if I never consult what I’ve written — the act of writing it out is enough.
My Conclusion
I concluded from my own experience that how I write out my notes affects their quality, and how much I gain from them. Perhaps I’m alone in this feeling, however, I sincerely doubt it. Writing things out by hand has enormous power to make us better readers. I know for a fact that when I make a few quick notes with a pen on paper about what I read I find myself more easily able to remember it and to reflect on it, keeping what I’ve read as a part of my life for much longer than I would have I typed the note out on a computer.
