Commentary: Ditching note-taking apps for old-fashioned pen and paper could do us good

SINGAPORE: Earlier in August, thousands of Singapore students discovered that their personal learning devices were wiped clean. Some, including those sitting for the upcoming O-Levels, lost access to several years’ worth of notes. 
The Ministry of Education (MOE) later ordered that the Mobile Guardian app be removed from students’ personal learning devices, as the app was responsible for a cybersecurity breach that erased the data. While MOE could fully restore data that was backed up on the cloud, it could not recover locally stored information on a “small fraction” of devices.
Losing your notes months before a national exam is the stuff of anxiety dreams – but this is indeed the nightmarish reality for a few students. It shows how vulnerable we are when smart devices are intertwined with our lives.
Having our hard work evaporate in a hacking incident was not a risk during my student years, simply because personal learning devices and e-learning had not been invented yet.
But handwritten notes seem like an antiquity today, even for working adults. Organisers of Zoom meetings reassure participants there’s no need for it because everything will be recorded and presentation materials will be available online.
Many adults will admit to their deteriorating handwriting, and won’t be able to recall the last time they penned a note or letter.
Should handwritten notes make a comeback, whether we’re students or not?
As a Gen X-er, note-taking took up a huge chunk of my time in and out of the classroom – from primary school all the way to university.
We were constantly nagged by our teachers to write summaries of relevant textbook chapters to consolidate our learning. Many of us went the extra step, creating our own flashcards to prep for exams.
Regular stationery runs were a must. I adored MPH at Stamford Road for the chichi air-conditioned environment, and a mom-and-pop stationery store in Serangoon Gardens because of its lower prices and amazing selection of scratch-and-sniff stickers. 
Choosing the right note-taking paraphernalia, from pens to highlighters and foolscap paper, involved years of trial-and-error and careful decision-making.
Much effort was also spent protecting our precious notes. We spent ages sticking donut-shaped reinforcement stickers over the punched holes, before arranging the notes in sequence and securing them with metal-capped strings called treasury tags. Then we filed our notes in labelled folders on the right shelves, so we could retrieve what we needed within seconds.
We sometimes compared notes and picked up tricks such as creating mind maps or using shortcut symbols. We also decorated them with eye-catching headings, drawings, stickers and maybe even the initials of a secret crush, carefully concealed within a doodle of flowers and vines.
My friends and I drew funny cartoons and scribbled encouraging phrases in the margins of each other’s notes. Coming across them during revision put a smile on my face.
I developed an emotional attachment to my notes – to me, they were the culmination of effort I had put into my studies. They were like familiar old friends I could count on, and were the last things imprinted on my brain before I headed into the exam hall.
It was after a succession of house moves that I finally let go of decades worth of my notes, with a heavy heart.
Research points to several benefits of note-taking with pen and paper over digital devices.
Cognitive scientist Daniel T Willingham notes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? that we remember the things we think about, not necessarily the things we are told. 
When you write notes in your own words, you reframe someone else’s ideas into a form that can be concisely expressed on paper. This mental effort increases the chance of this information being transferred to your long-term memory.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology compared brain activity in students writing notes with those typing. It found that those taking notes by hand displayed greater connectivity between different brain regions, which is needed for memory formation and encoding new information.
Neuroscience professor Audrey van der Meer, who co-authored the study, surmised that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking.
“It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she said. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.”
Personal learning devices also come with distractions. A study by US researchers found that university students using laptops in large lecture classes were only spending 34 per cent of the time taking notes, and 20 per cent on social media sites.
Other studies found that students perform better on tests when laptops aren’t allowed in class, and that having multiple tabs open in browser windows negatively impact attention and memory.
So here’s something to reassure students who lost their data in the Mobile Guardian incident – spending the next few months developing a new set of revision notes might help you ace your exams.
You may wish to adopt a “divide and conquer” approach. Gather a few friends and agree among yourselves who will create study notes for which subject. Set a deadline, then make copies of those notes for one another.
Handwritten notes may have a place outside the classroom as well. In a Reddit thread asking if it makes any sense for adults to still use pen and paper in this digital day and age, some said that the time and labour writing requires makes it a rewarding activity.
“Same reason I still cook and eat delicious meals instead of having ‘astronaut food’. I enjoy it,” said one.
Others point out that pen and paper are a welcome break from our screen-filled lives, and that at work meetings, note-taking signals to clients that their feedback is important.
And of course, old-fashioned note-taking is virtually free. A user pointed out that paper doesn’t have 50 ads that they have to skip.
As Professor van der Meer noted, “The brain is like a muscle, and without appropriate and regular challenges, neural networks will not be established or may even disappear, and the brain will effectively shrivel.”
Surely that is something worth taking note of, especially since our population is ageing so rapidly.
Tracy Lee is a freelance lifestyle writer based in Singapore.