Thinking with a pen and no paper

procrastination with technology

I think much better with a pen in hand. I used to say the same about cigarettes, probably with greater truth, but these days I’d rather have wrist pain than heart disease. Either way I retain a lot more of the books I have read when I argue with them in the margins of the page. In theory you can do the same with typed notes on screen with a Kindle or a PDF; all I can say is that it doesn’t work that way for me. I type reasonably fast and fluently but it does not often feel so much an expression of my own spontaneous thoughts as handwriting can be. Also, typing demands two hands, whereas handwriting leaves one hand on the page, which makes my body a bridge between the author’s thought and mine.

My handwriting is not good or tidy but many of the irregularities and imperfections seem to encode some kind of metadata which brings back for me the emotions with which I wrote and the place I wrote it from. So that’s all wonderful. The problem is that I can seldom find these notes again. My friend Wendy, who went to university and learned to study like a properly educated person, writes all her notes at the end of a book, with page references and that would be one solution; but it’s not for me

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Instead I’ve thought for years that it ought to be possible to have handwritten notes made legible, searchable, and organised. Just possibly a tablet and a stylus might solve the problem. But anyone who’s tried to use a stylus on the glass screen of a tablet will know how exhausting it is to control the fine movements of something that wants to skid about like a pebble thrown onto a frozen lake. The answer to that particular problem turns out to be a roughened screen protector with a name like “Paper like” (there are numerous brands) which gives the motion of plastic on shiny glass the feel of a fountain pen on paper. The problem of decyphering remains.

What solves that is a remarkable little app called Nebo, which can read accurately some really foul handwriting. It’s much better than the handwriting recognition built in either to Windows or the Ipad OS. Despite some oddities of formatting, I’d guess the error rate, even on my handwriting, is about one word in fifty. So what I do now is to use the split screen on the Ipad with whatever I am reading down one side, and Nebo on the other. Both the Kindle app and Zotero will allow you to attach notes to highlighted text, so I write the notes on the Nebo side and then copy and paste them into the reading side. Of course it’s more faff than simply writing onto the margins of a paper, but I think it is worth the extra effort to have something that can so easily be brought into whatever I am writing. This may be wrong. Perhaps the discipline of typing up handwritten notes would fix things yet more firmly in my aged brain.

Of course none of these tricks is really a substitute for the thing you have to do if you are to understand a worthwhile book, which is to read it at least twice over, carefully.