Katie Coen

Throughout my decades of sitting in a classroom in grade school all the way to college, I have always been a hand-writer. There’s something so satisfying about taking aesthetically pleasing notes that are organized on a page. I think it’s incomparable to anything a computer document could do. My bubbly handwriting with a handful of colors across a notebook page have always helped me in my studies more than typing away on a laptop. 

Now that my classroom experiences are almost over and I move into the working world, I’ve realized that there were more benefits to my handwritten notes than just looking good. Numerous studies have found advantages to writing by hand.

Memory

One key thing handwriting can benefit is your memory. Top Education Degrees says that people who take handwritten notes are more likely to recall useful information from their notes than people who type. These people understood the content better and were able to remember it for a longer period of time. 

Creativity

Whether you are trying to become the next big artist or just formulating a school project, creativity is used. It’s the thing that takes all projects to the next level and makes them unique from anything else. Vanilla Papers explains how writing by hand can help boost creativity and push you to think outside the box. 

“Writing by hand pushes your mind forward towards new observations and conclusions. It forces you to slow down and fish out those shiny pebbles of insight from your stream of consciousness.”

Vanilla Papers, 16 Powerful Benefits to Writing by Hand

The author shares an example of how one study done on school children found that those who wrote essays by hand had more ideas than those who typed. These flowing ideas are also used in design sprints to create new products or services.

Connection to Design Sprints

The creators of design sprints created a process of writing and drawing by hand. Once an idea has been developed and research has been done, sprinters are instructed to sketch specific details of the product or service being created. Jake Knapp introduces this process in his book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.”

“We’re convinced it’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions”

Jake Knapp, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

There are four steps in the sketching process. Notes are taken first, and then used to draw out simple ideas including doodles, headlines, and stick figures. The Crazy 8 exercise allows a sprinter to zone in on one of their ideas and create eight ways of visualizing it. In the final step, they take their favorite visualization and show the steps of reaching the idea over three sketches. This is called the solution sketch.

These sketches help the brain develop and think ideas through before discussing them with the sprint group. Doing it all by hand helps the brain spit out ideas and deliver the image that’s in your brain directly to the paper. 

Next time you are coming up with brilliant ideas or just taking class notes, try the old school method. It might just take your intelligence to the next level.