Writing by hand is good for your brain

I'd rather learn a language than write with a pen. In my life at least, writing with a pen is now depreceated. Maybe writing left handed would be worth it but I can't think of another good reason to bring it back.

I'd like to go back to writing with pen and paper, but my bad handwriting bothers me. So any time I start writing something, part of my concentration is wasted on trying to make it look good.

I like writing by hand and now it’s easier than ever to just take a picture and give it to an LLM for a transcription if you need it on your phone/computer. Small local models work well for this too.

Writing by hand is in no way good for your brain.

Is there an online support group for people who have been on the keyboard so long that their penmanship looks more like klingon than english? Is there a way to correct this?

I like handwriting, but it struggles when you need to copy it in your obsidian

I have always found interesting that we thing as equivalent "different parts of the brain light up" and "good for the brain". I say this as someone who has an tiny knowledge of neuroscience, but wouldn't you want sometimes to have low brain activity, for certain things?

Having the brain making more connexions and using more resources to do the same thing could be seen, from one point of view, as waste ?

Not that I disagree with the article, of course. Test results speak for themselves, but for example, when I am writing stories, do I need to "better remember" them, or do I need to go faster through my first draft ? (3 years and counting at the moment...wish me luck !)

Probably one of the best interview questions that I've been asked over the years, is to write a script (can't remember the purpose) in bash, using pen and paper.

Really made me think hard.

So, why nobody write a code by hand using pen onto paper right now? If it's that good, shouldn't we?

> I want to again live in a world where application developers use public, community driven standards to create interoperable applications with common data standards.

Has this ever been the case?

Also common data standards in a way restrict innovation when the standard body can't move fast enough.

This is gonna open up the science of stimuli necessity. Everything we do is effort then reward, we need to do things on our own.

I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.

It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.

I completely agree with this, but where do I start if I have terrible handwriting and never really learned cursive properly?

> Don’t worry about conserving paper

The best suggestion, thank you

not only writing, but drawing, art, putting a pen or pencil to paper/tablet and just flowing is great to keep the brain muscle active.

Great advice. Didn't know Neal is left-handed.

Neal, if you're reading this, will you ever visit Germany on a book signing tour?

So I should buy a drawing tablet for my laptop so I can hand write my AI prompts? Got it!

(/s if not obvious!)

im right-handed and was taught to write by a left-handed parent so i have a goofy technique where i have my hand above the line like a lefty. this causes me to write the letter "s" backwards, from bottom to top

Doesn't work for everyone. I have essential tremor and my handwriting is abysmal.

Absolutely. It helps me a lot, especially when it comes to remembering important tasks or planning my days.

i like writing by hand, and definitely generate better content / thoughts. I don't like going back through my writing and putting it in electronic form (an no writing on an electronic device (ipad/remarkable etc.) doesn't is not a substitute).

>Use cursive

Any good resources to learn cursive?

What about writing code by hand?

"Sure, doing X the old-fashioned way is slow, inefficient, and inconvenient in a hundred minor and major ways - but haven't you considered that it might, on an incredibly shaky connection with low effect sizes and uncertain causality, be better than your brain?"

Sorry, but no. I trust that "the Old Way is just Better in an invisible, unproven way" about as much as I trust any other "appeal to tradition".

I like Neal Stephenson's writing, but I wouldn't take this advice seriously.

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What if I told you writing in all caps is even better for your brain.

I'm a huge fan of N.S. and what he says might be true, but I have an aversion to writing by hand after being tortured while growing up in the late 80s.

I just couldn't seem to hold a pen or pencil the right way and would always fall behind following along with the rest of the class. I was forced to spend hours at home with worksheets tracing over letters. I was led to believe that if I couldn't write properly I would be a complete failure.

It turns out being able to use a computer and type quickly was a more useful skill.

I have had, and continue having, way above average use for my handwriting. It works for all sorts of math, quick diagrams on anything from geometric reasoning to electronics, composing tricky fragments of text, taking notes on something I'm doing that requires a myriad of easy-to-forget details, and so on.

But my 1st grade teacher and my 1st to 12st year classes variously agreed on how atrocious my handwriting was. Famously, my 1st grade teacher told my parents, "there's no hope". She was right. And, four decades later, it irks me to no end that every time I grab a pen and start writing, the ghosts come to look over my shoulder and judge. "Look at it, he's at it again. That 'f' looks like anything but... That's not a proper uppercase 'I'... you could summon a demon with it, but it would be a pitiful one. That 'g' is vicious. Is that a '1', a '3' or a '7'? Didn't we fail you enough times in basic arithmetic for that? Also, that line of text is sagging as much as your sitting, boy..."

This applies to code as well, except, typing, instead of generating

My thoughts on this is there is a deliberate act going on that is doing more for retention than just the simple act of using a (fountain) pen.

If I am in a lecture and I am writing down everything I hear as fast as possible in one ear, on paper, out the other style I don't think writing is any different than typing the same way.

If I am in lecture and I am trying to stay deliberately between the lines of paper, then I have to take the info in, process it in a way where I analyze and summarize it, and then put it on paper neatly. I have to do that for brevity and to keep up with the lecture. Its not the act of just writing, its the analyzation that occurs before the words hit the paper. This can be achieved with typing as well if you deliberately style your notes.

I think sometimes we correlate this in too simple of terms to use pen = better, the pen forces the deliberate action of analysis easier than typing does.

Here’s my question, what if the writing looks like handwriting?

All well and good for folks without hand issues.

tbh the value of this seems overstated and overhyped imo

I've always dabbled with this but gone back to just typing instead of writing by hand as it seens to possess many more advantages

The closest thing I have to this is more like speech to text or notes on a phone which seem more manual (speech) or slower than touch typing (phone)

I <3 Stephenson's earlier works: Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and even the lesser stuff (the university one, In the Beginning There Was the Command Line, etc.) were all incredibly well written, and I'd strongly recommend them.

But Cryptonomicon started to go in the wrong direction (though it was still good), and after that he completely lost me by writing 1000 page books that require you to learn half of an entirely new language he made up! His success seems to have made him completely lose the magic (of writing well) that he once had.

As such, I'd take any advice he gives with a mountain of salt. It's like getting advice from a "has been" former athlete: it might be good advice from their glory days, or it might just be junk they spew in their obsolescence.

20 years ago when I use to instruct a 101 class on programming, in the first 2 weeks, I made everyone write simple programs with paper and pencil. Students thought that was insane, I would catch them mocking it. I always had the last laugh... those who took it seriously always performed the best and went on to have more successful careers.

Out of all the things I’d consider to help me improve or be more productive, this has to be at the bottom. I actually used to write notes all throughout college, mostly because I couldn’t afford a laptop and would use the school desktop computers when actually writing code. But, I don’t see any degradation from moving to a workflow where I never physically write anymore.

I also don’t understand his stance on using cursive. Everyone that writes quickly develops their own scribble, which they can easily read and doesn’t involve taking the pen off the paper. What’s the point in relearning proper cursive?

This post makes me feel old

> If the pen’s ink reservoir is partly empty, so that it contains an air bubble, and if it’s positioned nib down, then, when you go up in an airplane, the bubble will expand as the ambient pressure drops, forcing ink out the nib. Once I figured that out, I got in the habit of making sure my pens were positioned nib up when taking off in an airplane. If I have time I’ll also refill the pen before departure, to minimize the size of the air bubble.

Finally! this was one of those things that bothered me for many years, but not enough to spend time to research :) . Thank you!!

"don't use a pencil" i stopped reading there. That's a completely invalid and stupid thing to say. Pencils are superior to any and all other writing instruments.

I have about 20 or 30 fountain pens. I do system architecture diagrams, with notes in the margin, using pen and ink. It does help me think. I actually find it relaxing and fun.

I'm surprised he didn't mention editing. On a computer this is trivial; on paper you need an ink eradicator, correction tape, or correction fluid. And even those are only good for small corrections. If you want to insert a sentence or paragraph somewhere, that's not really possible with paper.

Also, if you want your text to be published online or printed, it needs to be digitized somehow. Which is a good OCR tool for handwriting, especially if it's not very legible? Just feed scans into Gemini perhaps?

I don't think that the research is as conclusive as the article makes it out to be ( I know he links ).

I would consider this: maybe useful, do it if you find it entertaining.

the pencil industry has been waiting 30 years for this paper

Very little young people are writing by hand nowadays :( Mostly vaping xd

Do crosswords count?

Surprised honestly we haven't had similar claims for typing on keyboard versus typing on screens or dictation.

Anecdotally I find I connect more with what I write by pen as well.

Ultimately I want things to in text documents though (typst for me these days). If there was a non-slopware solution to ocr scanning to a typst doc, I would do it a lot more .

I mean, I love writing with fountain pen and I do it every day, but I have _read_ Anathem.

Stephenson mentions the Pilot G-2 Gel, and it is a great pen, especially for left-handers. I've found one that improves on it: the Pilot Acroball. It's a better G-2 and though it might be a bit hard to find at retail it can be found online in all kinds of variations.

I wrote almost my entire PhD thesis by hand, with a pencil. When I made mistakes I erased them. My handwritten notebooks contain close to the final version of each chapter (there were, of course, some further corrections after typesetting).

I don't like writing in pen. I like being able to erase stuff. Having scribbled out bits looks messy and gets on my nerves.

Whatever implement you choose, I do concur with the author that writing by hand is good for you.

I don't write much these days, but I do fill pages full of notes, mostly diagrams and other pictures. I don't understand how some people with jobs similar to mine don't use paper at all.