On April 5, 2016, the Personal Journal Section D of the Wall Street Journal carried a featured article entitled: “The Power of Handwriting,” which caught my attention. I grew up in an era when handwriting ruled, before the computer age, and well before the prominence of laptops, iPads, and smart phones. The article focused on student note taking research conducted by a host of prominent universities, including Princeton University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Nebraska, Harvard University and Washington University (St Louis), all schools of distinction. My immediate reaction: even the best universities need to study something, however pedestrian it may seem; but the article confirmed that “researchers have been studying note-taking strategies for almost a century.” Now this factoid caught my attention, and raised the subject to a serious plateau.

Not surprisingly, the study determined that students who had typed their notes wrote faster, at 33 words per minute, than students who had handwritten them, at only 22 words per minute. The surprising part, however, the pencil pushers outperformed the typing students. Hmmmm, perhaps after all, some old world ways may be superior to the cyber world in which we live.

The researchers collectively found that students who took longhand notes “appear to learn better, retain information longer, and more readily grasp new ideas. . .” Apparently, the brain is more stimulated by the handwriting effort, resulting in better retention than by going through a mechanical typing process. The typed notes were “so superficial,” because of the “tendency to take verbatim notes.” And further: “The [handwriting] process of taking them down encoded the information more deeply in memory.”

I commend the article. After all these years, I am gratified to know that by handwriting my lecture notes I had done something right in my youth. Alas, if only I could have read my handwriting, I may have done even better.