Don’t Forget to Write

I’ve always felt like something deeper was going on when writing by hand than when typing. Its nice to know its not just me.

Summer is winding down in my neck of the woods, where I am back at work getting ready for a new school year. As I sit at my desk today prepping syllabi and selecting readings, I am thinking about an essay I posted here about a year and half ago about memory processes (Memory: It’s all good). Turns out the essay provoked a bit of blog-o-sphere controversy. In it I stated, among other things, that writing by hand yields greater memorial outcomes than does typing. That is, if your aim in studying is to deeply process the material you should paraphrase and record the information with pen and paper, not with keystrokes. Typing, I said then, is an automatic process that stimulates little thought, whereas writing is an episodic process that engages your semantic memory system more deeply.

That portion of my memory essay caught the attention of…

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