When I started using Fountain Pens last year, I noted that there was something different about the quality of my writing. It seemed to have a different quality to it. At first, I couldn't figure out the reason for it. But as I kept writing I meditated on the subject. As I turned the idea around in my mind for a while, I came up with a few thoughts seemed to explain what I was both feeling and experiencing.

My Personal Reasoning

The first thought that came to my mind was that I had approached fountain pens from a different perspective than I had other writing instruments. I had started using them as a hobby, as a way to improve my penmanship. The point wasn't to write down the thoughts in my mind, but instead of work on better controlling the muscles in my arm and wrist.

I wanted to produce text that looked beautiful, no matter what the contents were. I was working from a workbook: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Brenna Jordan, to be exact. In the book she covers a lot of letter forms, variations, and suggests lots of practice sentences. I loved it. It required a fair amount of concentration to get some of the letter forms right, but the practice was exactly what I wanted.

However, after a while, my mind started telling me I needed to do something else. I needed to write something of substance. Something that had meaning, if only for me personally. That's when I started a journal.

Now I had tried to keep journals before, on my computer, in a note-taking application. I had taken to the idea of having a “second brain”, but not because I was sold on PKM or anything like that. My second brain experience came from a coworker from many years ago. He used to keep a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with a ton of notes on it. Those notes were chock-full of obscure, and unusual things that we encountered working on computer systems. He carried it everywhere. We referred to it whenever we ran into a problem that seemed like something he might have seen, but couldn't recall how to resolve the issue.

I can't even being to count the number of times he found either the exact information we needed, or information that assisted us in further diagnosing an issue in his PDA. We started referring to that device as his second brain.

Anyway, while PDA's had gone by the wayside, I had taken to the idea of creating a “second brain” for myself. Saving information that I thought might be useful in the future. And, it had seemed to me, that adding a journal full of notes and ideas made sense for my second brain. Only, it had never worked. I would add my journal entries to it for weeks or even a few months, and eventually stop.

And, to make things worse, the journal entries were (mostly) superficial. The entries really only related to other things I had been obsessing over, generally about things that I had already saved in the app. There wasn't the quality of ingenuity, uniqueness, or personal observation that I had wanted to capture.

However, when I started writing a journal on paper, in a notebook, all the unique, personal observations started coming out. All the things that I had wanted to accomplish in digital form were there, in analog, on sheets of paper in ink.

Why? In my mind I found three reasons:

1. I was cut off from the rest of the information in my second brain. Sure, I could have picked up my phone, or gone to my PC to access it, but I didn't.
2. Handwriting is a slower process. It isn't like typing in that in a few swishes of your fingers and twenty or thirty words appear on the screen in a matter of a few seconds. Writing twenty or thirty words required more focus, more attention, more effort.
3. Intentionality: I had more intent in the words that I put on the page. There wasn't the easy edits to correct the words on the page the way there was with a computer. Sure, I could always cross words out, and I did that at times, but the more you have to cross out and change on the page, the more the page starts looking messier and more difficult to read. And I had initially started writing with fountain pens to produce cleaner, nicer lettering and therefore pages.

Over time, I wondered if there was anything to back up my hypothesis about why handwriting was different from typing on the computer.

Testing My Theory

So, after seeing a video from Sbrebrown: The Benefits of Taking Handwritten Notes vs Digital Notes I decided to pose the question on the Fediverse: [ Question] Study of note-taking with Pens vs. Laptops. The subject is interesting, and has been attracting a lot of attention over the last decade or so. The question that has been examined is: do students that take handwritten notes do better than students who type notes on a laptop.

In a meta analysis Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis, researchers examined twenty-four studies that had been conducted over the last hundred years. They concluded that the studies indicated that there is a correlation between handwritten versus typed notes. Note, the interesting part here is that the study includes several papers that were not conducted in an academic setting as there wouldn't have been typewriters in a classroom.

In another paper, The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking researchers concluded from four studies that students did worse on conceptual questions because they were not processing information as deeply. Instead, they were mostly transcribing the lecture without thinking about it deeply.

However, there have been some publications that take the opposite position: Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: Replication Finds No Immediate Advantage to Writing Notes by Hand. While the most deeply analytical article is one that I just barely grasp at the surface level: The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle?, which goes so far as to have conducted neuroimaging studies of the brain while writing and typing:

Recent neuroimaging studies including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and positron emission tomography (PET) have provided insights into the neural mechanisms that underlie these two forms of written expression.

And the results were quite interesting (quoting the abstract):

Results: Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.

My Takeaway

To me, the neuroscience study reinforces the second and third thoughts that I had:

1. Handwriting is a slower process. It isn't like typing in that in a few swishes of your fingers and twenty or thirty words appear on the screen in a matter of a few seconds. Writing twenty or thirty words required more focus, more attention, more effort.
2. Intentionality: I had more intent in the words that I put on the page. […]

The idea that “Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing.” would seem to be in alignment with those thoughts. There is a whole different level of thought that is going into writing in a notebook – be it with a ballpoint or a fountain pen.

But, that doesn't mean that this is settled science. In fact, science is rarely settled on finding a single conclusion. Instead, the thoughts and understanding that emerge from science tend to track with the more predominant studies of the time, however there is always room for those findings to be challenged. This can be seen in the Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet article referenced above.

The thing that I would note about most of these studies is they are focused on taking notes in an academic setting: listening to a lecture and trying to capture the essence of what is being said. That, I think, is the bounding point to keep in mind. Scientists could find there are different considerations in different settings, and when the objective is different. For example: writing a letter, a poem, or a novel could well be sufficiently different from taking notes to warrant further study.

As for the first item on my list? I don't think this is something that really relates to the topic scientifically. It's a matter of how I have shaped myself, the habits that I have developed over the years since I decided to start building my “second brain.” It took conscious effort on my behalf to put myself in a position where I wouldn't access all the information that I had compiled. I decided that it would be easy to get too distracted from the act of writing itself.

And that's where I think I'll conclude this: I lean towards the idea that writing with a fountain pen is fundamentally different from typing based on the neuroscience, until proven otherwise.

Categories: #Editorials Tags: #FountainPens, #typing, #notes, #science, #neuroscience, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.