Uh... I've always been bad at handwriting, and have always been a "good tester." *shrug* Not that one man's experience refutes a good scientific study, but I just couldn't resist putting in my two cents' worth on a sweeping generalization.

Clive,

I’ve consider this possibility of qualitatively different modes of thinking as mediated by technology.

My suspicion: there are a lot of cognitions that are procedural, as opposed to declarative. That is, they arise from training, and cannot really be verbalized. Most of these procedural types of thinking are trained, over time and experience, and cannot just be initiated spontaneously. The example you give about scrawling notes is a perfect example; the ability to connect ideas together with the use of visual/symbolic aides is incredibly helpful in verbalizing otherwise ineffable ideas. I suspect that that type of thinking is trained, as are other modes of thinking. And these modes of thinking probably DO NOT transfer over, when the hardware of the procedure is no longer there.

Another example may be perhaps drawing or painting: remove the medium (or the ability to use a similar medium) and it probably becomes very difficult for the trained artist to verbalize the concepts they otherwise would be able to depict.

This leads me to wonder, then, if technology has an influence on modes of thinking. If we remove the pen and paper from students as they learn to think (like removing the paintbrush from the artist), does it then become impossible for those people to use those types of thinking procedures?

If Socrates had chatrooms rather than the streets of Athens, would he have developed his particular method of thinking? I think it is a very valid and important question.

I used to write (embarrassingly bad) poetry when I was a young woman, and I sporadically kept diaries from the age of 13 until my late 20s or early 30s, and I still have those tattered notebooks boxed up in my attic somewhere. I can't imagine writing horrid poetry or self indulgent diaries on a computer screen. I just can't picture keyboarding having the same purgative effect as seeing the ink flowing out of the pen like blood. (Ew. Sorry, flashback there.) Part of me wants to burn those notebooks, because they are so full of teenage angst and bad writing. But part of me relishes the notion of a future daughter of mine stumbling on this cache one day and knowing she is not alone. Burning floppies, or CD-ROMs, or hard drives -- or finding and trying to read them years/decades later -- certainly would not be as satisfying, to my esthetic.

For the same reason, I regret losing the letters from the British penpals I had in my teens. I would love to find and read those letters today. Remember penpals? It took 8 days for my letters to arrive at their destinations overseas, and it took another 8 days for me to get my penpals' replies from the time they posted them. EIGHT DAYS. Good grief. Still, the anticipation was part of the fun. For all the joy of email's instantaneity, there's something to be said for having to wait. I liked seeing the funny way my English and Scottish penpals wrote, and I loved the stickers, clippings, tapes, and other little items they would include with their letters. Email will just never feel so personal, to me.

Just a couple of years before email became widespread, I initiated a long-distance romance with someone I met at a CUP conference. (Remember those, Clive?) I sent him a letter after the conference. Now that I think of it, I did write and print it on the newspaper's new computers. (We'd JUST moved to desktop publishing a year or two before. We still had typesetting machines in the office, and we did layouts by hand, cutting and waxing things onto the sheets to be sent to the printers...) Waiting for his reply was torture. While it lasted, and especially as it got more serious, most of my subsequent letters were handwritten. Of course we eventually graduated to the phone. Even so, thinking back on on it, seems like it was the 19th century. Would an email epistolary romance have felt the same? I don't know.

Now I spend my entire workday at a computer, and although I later carried on some pretty hot email correspondences and ICQ conversations back when I was still single, I still don't write much of anything with serious emotional content using a keyboard. If I want to write a love letter, or a list of New Year's resolutions, or if I need to vomit up my feelings in writing so that I can analyze then purge myself of them, I will always reach for pen and paper -- preferably a good fountain pen and some nice heavy stock. A smooth-writing ballpoint and a coil notebook will do in a pinch. Does that make my brain different from today's teenagers? I don't know.

An interesting post, Clive. Thanks as always for your great work on this blog.

I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and I'd love to be able to type notes up on my laptop, but I can't because of all the specialized symbols that mathematicians use. So I'm pretty much forced to hand write notes.

I've never understand the value of cursive writing. My handwriting has been exclusively printing since the sixth grade, when I switched to a new school that was sufficiently permissive. I did just fine getting through all the rest of my schooling with printing alone. I guess cursive is supposed to be faster, but it's still slow, and trading off legibility for speed (there's a reason why forms all say 'PLEASE PRINT') seems like a dumb compromise. Replacing cursive with typing - fast and legible - seems like a net gain to me.

Here's an additional wrinkle for your post. For a number of years in health care administration, I had a secretary. This enabled me to dictate memos and long project descriptions. However, I acquired a microcomputer and began typing my own in; I also wrote several books with it.
Fast forward about 15 years. Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes out and I eagerly try to get back to dictating. I couldn't do it. I've tried several times (just to easy my typing fingers and wrists) but I think my writing is now tied to the act of typing.

Funny you should ask! I am one of those crazy creative and scientific people. My work requires lots of typing and writing long and complicated documents. Without first mapping out my thoughts in pictures and words by hand, I would not get to the typing in of all the support content later. People comment on the beauty of my handwriting and how I frame out concepts by mapping the thought process with diagrams and pictures, and then fill in the keys words and concepts. I use this "picture" as my guiding structure for building the story. Clients love it - because they always have something people look at. Typewritten stuff is somehow not as attractive or easy for people to get the picture.
Thanks for making me think of this. Something to share with my MBA students.

I started writing in block capital letters around grade 9 and haven't stopped since. Give me a medium point Bic (or Staedtler) with a stack of at least 10 sheets beneath it (allowing me to dig into the paper a little more) and I'm a happy author. The block cap aesthetic has proven to be a considerably creative medium over the years - I'm able to link up many of my letters and feel at times as though I'm still a 14 year old writing in caps to develop better graffiti skillz.
Over time though, I fell prey to the siren song of the keyboards klickity-klack, using it now for upwards of 90% of my writing. Fortunately, I may have stumbled across a lovely solution for all of you collision detectors out there -

http://www.fontifier.com/

Lastly, I think it's important to note that some industries MUST stop using handwriting. Below is a rather dated article, but the subject is a continuing debate in which many folks are still dying every year.

http://archive.salon.com/health/feature/1999/05/05/prescriptions/

I am quite certain that even rapid typing uses far less cognitive horsepower than manual writing of whatever speed. The typist doesn't have to worry about many things that demand the constant vigilance of the hand writer: keeping a straight line that is perfectly horizontal, spelling, word spacing, legibility, margins. And then there is the task of actually making letters. Though most of us are quite used to it, I don't really think we appreciate its complexity. It certainly is far more demanding than simply pushing a key (once one knows where the key is) and having a machine decide the precise dimensions of a letter. In addition to making the letters, your brain must somehow compute an optimal horizontal motion while also an optimal vertical motion (for the height of each letter at the same time). This is pretty tricky stuff. This is why an experienced typist does not need to look at the keyboard when typing whereas hand writing does not permit one to look away from the page for very long--an obvious advantage for the typist in a setting where notes are expected to be taken.

Because it allows greater speed, one can lay down ideas at the rate that they are produced, or more nearly so. Since writing is so slow, one is more likely to forget an idea by the time the current idea is committed to paper. This is why writing often begins as a rather messy project: the writer is desperately attempting to keep pace with idea generation. Notes are squiggled in the margin, on top of other sentences, abbreviated, truncated etc. Only by departing radically form accepted form does it allow the necessary speed for this purpose.

Having said that, typing does not allow nearly the same spatial flexibility that writing on paper allows. As I type this note, I don't think it would be possible to write something sideways in the margin, nor could I make arrows to connect one thought to another in sweeping motions (these things, however would be possible on a word processor though they would take more effort). Writing may not offer an inherent advantage, however. During the formative, imprintable stage of development, it is conceivable that someone could become just as comfortable and adept at organizaing information on a keyboard. But for those of us who grew up with a much greater reliance on writing by hand, it is difficult to imagine that typing words on paper would be sufficient to capture the flurry of ideas we might have when roughing something out.

Or maybe the rise of the computer is what has brought about the decline of the novel. To quote Ben Franklin: "You write with ease to show your breeding/ But easy writing is cursed hard reading."

Brilliant comments here. Steve's point about the influence of our "output technology" on modes of thinking is bang on, I think. Artificial intelligence people who try to create "common sense" 'bots -- i.e. programs that "know" basic facts like "water is wet" and "things fall when you drop them" -- run into what's known as the "knowledge representation problem": It is damnably hard to represent much human knowledge in words, because it's emboded in skills that come from using our bodies in particular ways. Any robot without a body can never amass or represent that type of knowledge. In this worldview, the cognitive effect of our tools is paramount.

J.T., so cool to get a CUP shoutout! (For the rest of you, by the way, "CUP" stands for "Canadian University Press", a very cool wire service / professional organization for Canadian university and college newspapers ... we were both involved with CUP conferences, which were insanely fun.) And yes, letter-writing is indeed where the rubber hits the road for most people when it comes to noting the cognitive differences between handwriting and typing.

Chris, yep, visual schematics are a thinking device essential in many sciences -- further to Steve's point, too. I'm interested: Do math students develop "good looking" handwriting "fonts" because of their need to write symbols so frequently? Does the skill transfer from numeric and symbol-writing to letter-writing?

Bill, I'm not surprised that dictation software doesn't work for you. It rarely works for anyone who is accustomed to writing by hand or by keyboard, for two reasons: i) It's too fast. Spoken English is several hundred words per second; handwriting is an order of magnitude slower, and even the average fast typist does only about 70 words per minute. This creates a nice buffer between the speed of your thinking and the speed of your typing/handwriting, which gives you time to think about what you're writing while you're writing it. Those modes of expression slow you down enough to allow you to ponder your prose. Dictation software, in contrast, can pretty much match the speed at which you talk, so you have less reflection time. The other reason is: ii) It's much harder to erase, cut and paste, and edit prose using dictation software. And as I pointed out in my original posting, the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the word processor is a key part of its creative mojo. Indeed, it's precisely why the word processor has so revolutionized human expression.

That latter point I'm making is a sort of gloss on what Daniel posts about so nicely: How the relative speeds of typing vs. handwriting are a one of the key components of their relative cognitive effects.

Colby, I'm an enormous fan of gorgeous cursive handwriting -- I'm not surprised your clients find the documents beautiful! This is why I wish my handwriting were better. I suppose I could always crack out a nice pen and just practice, of course. And Debbie, heh, that's precisely what's neat about cursive handwriting -- it's organically beautiful, or at least it can be. Everyone has a unique font!

Brian, Fontifier ROCKS. I am going to try out my own handwriting and blog about this soon! Thanks! Good point also about bad handwriting killing people -- that Salon article is fascinating.

Grey Duck, heh -- yes, these sweeping generalizations I'm making here are almost invariably doomed to be upstaged by individual experiences ...

I am a writer and editor - and have known for years that there is a real difference in the way I think when I write by hand. There seems to be less self-editing, more connection to the "artistic" and more flow to my thoughts. My writing by keyboard, on the other hand, is far more organized and logical - and so, at work, I compose on the computer. Thanks for bringing up a subject dear to my heart!

clive- you're right, wilson is wrong. repetitive stress issues aside, typing definitely can provide aesthetic enjoyment. there's a pure kinesthetic thrill when deeply immersed in the physical process of typing, in that fugue state of advanced keyboarding when thought is translated via the digital media -digital in the phalangeal sense of the word. just as many authors languish without their favorite biro or yellow legal pad, so other authors note their absolute addiction to a favorite typewriter, whose 'action' contributes to a state of 'flow'. paul auster wrote a book about his manual olympia typewriter. my favorite is the ibm selectric. it has a satisfying mechanical thwack and a vibrato feedback shudder -like a dualshock controller. and the sound of the key action and at about 80 wpm is magnificent. i had an old keyboard that had the 'selectric' sound function, but was a pale shadow of the real thing. i wish i had the aptitude to kludge some kind of simulcrum of the feel of it for my computer keyboard ...

The movie _You've Got Mail_ was on last night. Christo's post reminds me of how Greg Kinnear's character is obsessed with his electric typewriter and "even wrote a column about it in The Observer"...

Of course, neither typing nor handwriting would suffer from cognitive overload if writers would merely think of what they wanted to say BEFORE blathering it out...a casualty in the age of immediacy?

Of course, neither typing nor handwriting would suffer from cognitive overload if writers would merely think of what they wanted to say BEFORE blathering it out...a casualty in the age of immediacy?

As is clicking twice before a comment is submitted...

This article reminded of several other tangentially related things I've seen recently. First, an interview with Neal Stephenson in Salon where he talks about writing the entire Baroque Cycle trilogy in longhand and how it affected the finished product. Since the act of writing by hand allows mental editing between the first idea of a phrase and the time the pen hits the page, does it improve the finished product or at least reduce future editing time?

Next, an article on Presidential inauguration speeches and the loss of rhetoric and formalisms in American speech, from Slate. Is there a correlation between speech patterns and a shift from handwriting to typing, or is that pure coincidence?

Finally, the whole process of connecting these articles made me think of the UC Irvine article I saw today, which talked about the differences in brain structure between the sexes. Did I make these connections so quickly because I am hardwired to do so? Does the fact that I still can't properly type affect how my brain processes information?

As I was considering these ideas I wrote them down, on paper. This article had arrows out to the Presidential speech and the Stephenson interview, which both had arrows down to the idea of taking time while writing by hand vs. taking time to edit typed text afterwards. That connected to a question about brain structure and then on to the UCI article. Then two arrows connect that idea and this article to the brain structure article. From there I jumped to yet another idea (that I had in the car this morning) about my difficulty in picking a favorite or a top five list of anything, which I suspect is related to my non-linear thinking (which then circles back around again to handwriting vs. typing).

This will be food for thought for weeks. Thanks.

This is what I know: I can’t count the number of post-its that I’ve wasted when attempting to write a covering note that will be attached to something I’ve typed. The reason? Because I type so many hours a day my hand barely remembers how to form letters and I constantly make mistakes.

Perhaps translation between media is the intelligence-sharpening factor. At least, it might account for improving the cogency of one's message.

When I ask my drama students to do an improv, transcribe it by hand, type it up, then re-configure it as a script, the results are superior to scripts produced at one shot by a student sitting alone in a room.

The essays I wrote that required me to coallate handwritten notes with photocopied text and self-generated diagrams are superior to those produced by a series of MS word drafts.

The dynamic of production, reflection, reconfiguration is what might produce serious writing.

My guess is that, Clive, you read a print an article, exchange emails about it, capture some PDF's, do some note taking on a poratable keyboard, make a little entry in a day planner, then bring the whole assemblage together using a wordprocessing application.

It is the shuffling between languages that might account for the unsurpassed brilliance of your prose.

P.S. Must not post to the internet after 3 rum and cokes.

I'm a senior in high school, so I thought I'd add in the two cents from my demographic.

Clive says at one point that by high school students' senior year, they've practically lost the ability to write by hand. I can say from experience that this is indeed surprisingly true, though I didn't realize it until this year. The difference between typing essays and hand-writing them is vast, so much so that I actually have trouble concentrating while trying to etch my ideas into the paper in my left-handed, illegible, cursive scrawl. It is incredibly frustrating to think that my grade rests upon shaping words with my retarded hand.

Speaking of mental disability, a mentally and physically disabled student at my school shows a surprising amount of potential. So they stick him in some honors classes to see how he does. It appears that his brain might just have what it takes to keep up, so what do they do? They let him use his laptop so he can keep up in class and concentrate on his work.

Maybe not proof, but it is certainly strong indication that there's something interesting to learn about this subject.

I'm a senior in high school, so I thought I'd add in the two cents from my demographic.

Clive says at one point that by high school students' senior year, they've practically lost the ability to write by hand. I can say from experience that this is indeed surprisingly true, though I didn't realize it until this year. The difference between typing essays and hand-writing them is vast, so much so that I actually have trouble concentrating while trying to etch my ideas into the paper in my left-handed, illegible, cursive scrawl. It is incredibly frustrating to think that my grade rests upon shaping words with my retarded hand.

Speaking of mental disability, a mentally and physically disabled student at my school shows a surprising amount of potential. So they stick him in some honors classes to see how he does. It appears that his brain might just have what it takes to keep up, so what do they do? They let him use his laptop so he can keep up in class and concentrate on his work.

Maybe not proof, but it is certainly strong indication that there's something interesting to learn about this subject.

I'm a senior in high school, so I thought I'd add in the two cents from my demographic.

Clive says at one point that by high school students' senior year, they've practically lost the ability to write by hand. I can say from experience that this is indeed surprisingly true, though I didn't realize it until this year. The difference between typing essays and hand-writing them is vast, so much so that I actually have trouble concentrating while trying to etch my ideas into the paper in my left-handed, illegible, cursive scrawl. It is incredibly frustrating to think that my grade rests upon shaping words with my retarded hand.

Speaking of mental disability, a mentally and physically disabled student at my school shows a surprising amount of potential. So they stick him in some honors classes to see how he does. It appears that his brain might just have what it takes to keep up, so what do they do? They let him use his laptop so he can keep up in class and concentrate on his work.

Maybe not proof, but it is certainly strong indication that there's something interesting to learn about this subject.

My dad - in his 70s - has the worst handwriting, and written grammar / spelling you'll ever see. He was born left-handed, but went to a tiny village school in the 1920s, and was beaten until he wrote with his right hand. This was alrmingly common in the UK until the 50s - some people genuinely believed that left handed people had the devil in them! Result - he is what would now be described as profoundly dyslexic, although he's a very clever chap (taught himself degree level chemistry despite leaving school at 14 during ww2)

His handwriting is about 4mm high, and you can see obvious 'shakes' on his pen strokes. It's angular, spidery, varies in its lean and is unevenly spaced - you can tell it takes a huge ammount of concious thought to produce.

I never got more than a half comprehensible line or two in letters from him until he got a PC and email a couple of years ago. The act of typing - involving both hands, and therefore both hemispheres of his brain, allows his natural handedness and its related language centre to come to the fore. His prose isn't fantastic, but has increaced in volume and comprehensibility to an incredible degree.

I need to do a bit of double checking about the lefthanded/righthemisphere language centre, righthanded/lefthemisphere thing, but I think it's basically right...

When I learned handwriting 45 years ago, we went straight to cursive (this was in Indonesia). The idea that you could write a whole page in print was preposterous... In high school (this was in Hong Kong in the 60's), everybody used fountain pens for their class work, and we all wrote in cursive.

My handwriting is still OK, but sometimes stiff (I use the keyboard a lot), and I notice I am lazy about some strokes, as in making the effort to distinguish my lower case "u" and "n" (which looks like "u"). But it might be my "handwriting personality" as opposed to any motor degradation.

I do find that the writing instrument I use makes a big difference. I prefer a medium to broad nib with an easy flow, so a good fountain pen or a felt-tip pen feels good. A thin ball-point pen or one that requires a lot of pressure drives me crazy. I also find it unpleasant to write with gel (rolling ball) pens--they don't have the right feel of resistance on the paper; they are too smooth.

I'm one of those people who was born to type rather than hand-write - my handwriting has moods of its own, and I do find it tedious to write unless I'm scribbling or doodling. Things flow faster for me when I type.

Also, when I type, it's almost like meditation; I go into a mild trance and everything just flows. With writing I would have to think about what I'm writing and how, and often I end up not having a CLUE what I was writing about.

I have a couple of online journals, and I've gone through multiple phases where I'll get myself notebooks and paper journals and write in there instead; every time I would stop halfway and go back to my computer. I can't help it. It's just like I've got keyboards attached to my fingers.

(demographics : 19 1/2 year old female college student from Malaysia who has been using a computer since she was about 2 or 3. Learnt cursive for less than a year at school but never got the hang of it. Always chastized for poor handwriting.)

I think differently when I'm typing vs. when I'm handwriting. As someone above noted there's a different feel to the page when you can draw arrows, make doodads, do real easy page layout to put things side by side, all that other freeform stuff that's rarely simple when you're typing into a text input box.

My experience with the net is that it influences my writing style more than I care to admit. When I start using one text-heavy program a lot it starts to show up in my journals and notebooks as new page layout.

My actual handwriting is legible enough for me to reread it later, even if I've been writing in cramped circumstances. I value being able to do written text for those 15 minute blocks of time spent on the bus where there are things you want to remember at the start and end of the day.

(demographics: 40 yrs old, learned to type on a manual typewriter, have been online continuously for 20 years)

It is interesting to see the way writing technology influences writing systems. Cursive writing was optimized for ink pens with continuous flow. Block lettering was optimized for instruments that produce discrete strokes, like styli and biros. (It is interesting that the ball point pen worked better with the ancient writing system designed for a stulus on a wax tablet). Typewriters encouraged a certain pithy, sentence by sentence style, since it was hard to make any corrections. Word processors brought back improvisation, since corrections are nearly costless. Modern speech recognition systems with their troublesome correction mechanisms are more like typewriters, though this may change in the future.

Paul Graham has an interesting essay on writing as a way of thinking. He points out that the word "essay" comes from the French word for "try", and that an essay is a means of trying out thoughts and ideas, and often being surprised by their ramifications. Then again, he is serious about his work as a computer programmer, and programming is all about trying things and seeing what the computer thinks of them. Usually, it isn't much, but surprise is part of the game.

I remember making the shift from ball point pens and typerwriters to word processors and feeling a great sense of relief. But even in the early 1970s, the choice of ones implement of expression was an emotional issue. I remember the debates about the old Teletype 110 20lb force keyboard as against the lighter Hall effect no-feedback models. Should one touch type or use two finger search and destroy?

We used to joke that you could tell a great computer programmer by his sensitivity to the keyboard. A truly great hacker could feel a missing "p" key even under a seven layers of keyboards stacked up in front of the screen, even as a true princess could feel a pea through seven layers of mattresses.

P.S. Does anyone know why "ous" followed by "com" is considered questionable by your comment filter?

Ever more awesome comments here. Erik, that's a cool point: could "translation between media" as we read, take notes, and write, engage the various cognitive biases that are latent -- for good or for ill -- in each? Your description of my writing technique is pretty much exact, by the way. I've used a paper day planner for years because I need a huge layout for my day; the teensy screens of palm pilots never quite worked for me. That's also quite revealing about your drama students. I've heard lots of fiction/poetry/drama writers tell me they write by hand, or by typewriter still.

Actually, interestingly enough, writing by typewriter is one mode we haven't considered here yet. The playwright I know here in New York found that the quality of his writing increased massively when he switched from Microsoft Word to an old, 1950s-vintage typewriter. Again, he described it as an issue of speed: Since he moved much more slowly on a typewriter, he wrote shorter, terser lines, which, for him anyway, apparently worked nicely.

Hey Chris (my sister!): You're an interesting test case here. You say that your handwriting has gone to pot because you type so much -- but you also know how to use shorthand and use it to take notes at meetings, right? So is your shorthand still in good shape?

Matt, wild news about that student in your school. Does his physical disability make handwriting hard?

Kim, yes, I'd heard about the campaign against left-handedness. In many romance languages, the word for left is a variant of "sinister", and the associations between the left and evilness are ancient. Two years ago, Chris McManus published an excellent book called Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures, which among other things argued that the small percentage of humans who are left-handed are genetically adaptive for the entire human race, at the species level.

Ray, that issue of the quality of friction between different types of pen and the page has bedevilled the guys who make tablet-style computers, the ones where you "write" on the screen with a stylus. People need a certain amount of friction to write well, so they've spent years trying to create screen surfaces that match the peculiar dynamics of paper. Not much luck, so far.

Kaleberg, the reason that's considered questionable is due to its similarity to some spam URL that MT-Blacklist has in its database. I'll try and see whether it's current spam -- if it's a year or even a few months old, the spam is probably ceased to roam the Net and I can delete that filter.

Great point about Graham's essay -- I loved it too, and blogged about it last fall. And also amazing points about the similarity between typewriters and voice-recognition systems ... I'd never made that connection before.

Edward, you've got some excellent thoughts on your blog about note-keeping ... that software you've been using sounds very cool.

Tiara, heh, yes, I feel that "trance like state" when I'm typing all the time. Particularly while blogging.

Disclaimer: I did not read all of the comments, so I apologize if someone has mentioned this.

Anyway, regarding the quote:

In high school and college, any student without a 24/7 laptop cannot hope to keep accurate notes on a lecture course. Kate Gladstone... estimates that while a student needs to jot down 100 legible words a minute to follow a typical lecture, someone using print can manage only 30. "That's fine for class," she said, "if the class is first grade."

True, you can get more down "on paper" while typing than writing by hand. But 100 words a minute? We're taking notes, not transcribing the lecture!

I know this because I am a college student. It has been my personal experience (and the experience of my friends) that we actually learn better when we don't try to scribble down everything the prof says. It's better to internally process the message, then summarize it in notes.

Oh, and very few students use laptops (at least at my school, the University of Wisconsin) to take notes in lecture. For whatever reasons, pen and paper are still the preferred tools for note-taking.

This is maybe a little off-topic, but an important point to consider in this discussion.

Dijkstra, one of the most influential computer scientists, was very particular about the tools he used for his writing. He insisted on using Mont Blanc Meisterstuck fountain pens, and experimented with different inks until he created a good mix that satisfied him.

He was also very particular about the notational conventions he adopted for expressing his ideas. This is because, he believed that the tools you use shape your thinking.
"We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible."
[EWD-1305]

For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as "EWDs", to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. His hand-writing, as well as his writing, is beautiful. Here is a sample[EWD-1305].

Murat, thanks for the info and links! His handwriting is indeed lovely.

John, interesting to hear your observations. It doesn't necessarily surprise me that many college students still use notepaper and pens, because for all of the speed and efficiency of laptops, they have crappy ergonomics: Heavy to carry, need electricity, incompatible with spills from coffee/Coke, clicking noise of keyboard annoying in a quiet lecture hall, etc. Notepad and paper are portable, powerless, silent, and virtually unbreakable.

I wonder this has anything to do with the dominance of the left or right brain hemisphere. As an art major, my right is more dominant. I prefer writing in cursive more than typing on the computer. For writing papers, I find that I can articulate my thoughts better in writing because it feels like I'm drawing. The act of writing is like an expressive act, thus enabling me to express my thoughts better.
On the other hand, a business major friend of mine has terrible handwriting and prefers typing.
Just a thought. There are always exceptions.

What you are describing here is a condition related to dyslexia called dysgraphia. The physical process of writing takes too much brain CPU cycles to leave anything left for other processing.. including sometimes listening to what's going on in class. Elementary students with this problem often quickly get labelled ADHD because they seem "off task" when they are supposed to be writing. (They are "off task" because their overloaded brains have forgotten what they were supposed to be doing.)

I am a parent of two children with dysgraphia. My son (now 14 in the 9th grade) wasn't diagnosed until he was in the 7th grade. One of the first things they did for him was to give him a portable keyboard (from Alphasmart). His grades on writing assignments jumped 30 points overnight... he's still not doing as well as he could (he's got 7 years of feeling like he was stupid to get over, too), but I firmly believe that without that keyboard, he would have been an 8th grade drop out... a kid with a 130+ IQ who couldn't cope with the demands of writing in school. My daughter (now in the 4th grade) was only diagnosed within the last month.. so hopefully we have managed to head off the "I'm stupid" problems.

I, myself, have horrendous handwriting and printing. I started printing in the 8th grade and shortly after that, stopped worrying about the "correct" way to write letters.. I use "smaller" capital letters for certain letters and often mix case within words. Also in the 8th grade, I realized the reason I was doing poorly in lecture classes (think history) was that I couldn't concentrate on the lecture if I was trying to take notes... so I stopped doing it and instead tried to memorize what was said.

I have picked up a paper journal again, and I find that when I am writing, the rest of the world disappears.. so I have to make sure that no one needs me while I'm trying to write. :)

For more information on this, and how right/left brain thinking fits into all this... go to Google and search on "dysgraphia" and "gifted writing problem"

When I was in grade school cursive was graded like a class and I constantly received D's in it because my writing wasn't pretty. I had such low self-esteem because of it. I learned to type 100wpm, so I wouldn't have to bother using cursive to write fast. I never missed it and ended up getting a MBA.
My 3 kids don't know cursive as their school doesn't teach it, so fortunately they will never know that pain.

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I'd definitely agree that handwriting dies by the time you've gotten to the end of high school -- I had a similar experience to one of the other commenters in that the real issue in exams wasn't about the ideas, but the presentation of them ... I was advised by my teachers to write all my exams in BLOCK CAPITALS else they figured my A+ average would plummet!

One of the problems with being forced to write at school that I've found now, though, is that I don't learn a great deal when I type. It's fine for expressing myself when I already have an idea, but crap for revision or for actual learning.

Hopefully they'll just let kids type from an early age in future so they're not caught in a similar catch-22

For me, there's nothing like a nice pen and a big piece of paper for taking notes. I've learned that my own style is to do mind maps. These are also called spider diagrams, basically just key words linked by lines to other key words. They are great for note taking, and later for review and generating ideas. So the handwriting becomes like drawing, like Jennifer's comment.

Mind manager from mindjet.com is the computer software that does a pretty good job with mind maps.

Clive commented on the quality of friction between nib and paper, something that I had noticed was missing with gel roller pens for me, and noted that this is what is missing in tablet computers, when people write with a stylus on a glass surface. I found this to be the case too with my Palm, but found a solution of sorts: put a piece of Scotch tape on the writing part of the screen. The surface of the Sctoch tape gives a nice sense of friction, although this diminishes with use as the surface is worked smooth. Of course, the solution is to remove the old tape and put in a new one.

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I blogged about this once, when I noticed that I still reached for a pen and paper for certain tasks: "puzzles and poetry", things that are too urgently abstract for type. But then I can't touch-type, so I'm wondering if it is just as much about speed as the tactile. Anyway, I found a good article on The Phenomenology of Writing by hand .

I wonder if Mr Online Pharmacy has to think about his spamming when he types.

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