Longhand is good for learning

Typing columns on a computer can be a challenge, with all the distractions these days, so once more I turn to pen and paper, a more reliable method of ….

Wait, the pen’s running out of ink. Gosh darn it! You try to write about using a flipping pen and the stinkin’ son of a gun runs out of freaking ink! Like what the heck, man?

That was “cursive” writing: not actually cursing, but sort of like it.

So anyway, before I can write about the advantages of writing longhand, I have to unscrew the pen and check the cartridge and … yep, ink’s down to the point. I’ll get another one.

I easily can check my ink load because my pens are all Pilot G2s, the only kind I use. No office stocks good pens, you know, because people would steal them. I’ve bought my own since the 1980s, when a fresh company pen froze in the cold at a crime scene in Phenix City.

I once left a Pilot G2 pen in my pocket in the laundry, and it came apart in the washer. When I put it back together, it still wrote. And that particular pen didn’t get ink all over my clothes, either. But another one did, later. A G2 will bleed out in your shirt pocket, too, if you forget to click it shut.

It makes a sharp “click,” when you pop the button. I’ve learned that if you impatiently click it over and over during meetings, it really starts to annoy people, who frown at you and sometimes get too distracted to keep talking. It would be a good way to communicate via Morse code.

Besides a good pen, you need good paper. Thanks to my former colleague Lily Gordon, I have a classy black hardback spiral notebook she bought me for a birthday, years ago, so I could keep a journal.

I’ve tried to keep a journal, but I can’t keep up the pace. When you write for a living, you don’t want to write in your free time. You want to go home and read a book or listen to the radio or watch TV and let someone else do the writing for a while.

Go home and try to write on a laptop, and before you can open a Word document you’re getting emails and Facebook notifications. And maybe three hours later you think, “Now what was it I meant to write? Something about ink? Tattoos, maybe?”

No wonder writing with pen and paper is better for learning than typing on laptops. Research shows college students who take notes longhand during class grasp the lesson’s meaning more than those who transcribe lectures on computer.

You might think that’s because the laptoppers studied were checking email and Facebook or Instagram or whatever, but their laptops weren’t online. Also the researchers warned them about summarizing rather than transcribing, and the results held. Even when tested later with time to go back over their notes, students who wrote by hand fared better.

In a report on the study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, the magazine Scientific American said:

“In most typical college settings … internet access is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40 percent of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education. In one study with law school students, nearly 90 percent of laptop users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five minutes, and roughly 60 percent were distracted for half the class.”

I don’t recall other findings from that research, so I’ll have put down the pen and paper, go online and look it up.

See you in about three hours.

This story was originally published August 21, 2016 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Longhand is good for learning."