Sometimes grandma does know best

Barbara here. During the past week there have been some interesting posts about how we writers manage distractions like email, social media, and the lonely call of the dishwasher to be unloaded. If you work on a laptop connected to the internet, those little alerts and pings can pull you out of the story and down a rabbit hole of links to cat videos and the latest Trump outrage. Hours can pass without a word of progress on that novel with the looming deadline.

Several techniques have been proposed, including editing on paper and writing standing up at a computer without internet access.

There have also been posts about the damage to our attention span and abstract thinking caused by the constant, rapid-fire input of information in our digital age. This has been a serious concern among us child psychologists for several decades, and only growing worse as young brains today are shaped and developed in this new reality. Flitting from one small chunk of information to another not only does not strengthen the capacity for sustained concentration (quite the opposite) but it also does not allow for deeper reflection, analysis, and synthesis of ideas into a bigger picture. One cannot present Immanuel Kant in a series of short, interactive info bites, nor can one ever understand him without years of building up the brain to handle the complexity. Brains need training and practice to master a skill. We are training them all wrong.

Working memory underlies much of higher-order thinking. We have to be able to keep information in our short-term memory and play with it there in order to synthesize or analyze it. Working memory is increasingly underused because of gadgets that allow us to access information from our Google Home devices and phones instead of our own memory. Mental math (like calculating the tip) is excellent practice for working memory, but memorization of addition and times tables has been abandoned in favour of calculators. Furthermore, the use of word processors, no matter how convenient, speeds up the act of getting idea from brain to page and therefore cuts down on the amount of reflection and reorganization those ideas undergo.

So, to bring this post back to the business of writing, I'd like to propose a simple technique that has fallen into disfavour and invites astonishment from writing colleagues – good, old-fashioned longhand. I write my first draft using a pen and pad of yellow paper. My laptop sits ignored in the corner of the coffee table. When I occasionally open it up to check a piece of information, I inevitably fall down the internet rabbit hole and lose my focus on the story, so I've learned to simply mark "check this" in the draft before I carry on.

Besides keeping me away from distractions, longhand is a powerful tool for sinking deeper into the story. Because my pen can't keep up with my brain, I have time to think about each word and each action in more detail, choosing better words and hopefully adding richness that I may not have thought of had I been flying through the scene. The first drafts are a mess of crossed-out sentences, arrows, scribbles in the margins, and "insert next page" notations, so much so that they are nearly illegible. Even if I were wealthy enough to afford a secretary, he or she would never be able to decipher them. Transcribing those scribbles onto my computer is a laborious process, but even that gives me time for further reflection and editing.

I may be swimming against the tide here, but I'm not alone among experts. Studies have shown that students who take notes on a laptop do not understand or remember the material as well as those who take longhand notes. The latter requires more paraphrasing and organizing in order to capture the same material while keeping up with the teacher. It seems some good old-fashioned pedagogical techniques that have been tossed aside in the digital age have some uses after all.

Too bad most kids don't learn cursive any more.