Write on, brother.

Everybody writes sometimes, even if they only write lists or notes. The question is, how do you write? Do you use pen and pad, or do you dash of memos and things on tablets, smartphones, and computers?

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Okay, you're not doing it wrong, but one of the immutable rules of writing a blog is that you have to tell people that whatever they're doing, they're doing it wrong. ("10 Reasons Why You Eat Peas Wrong -- #8 Will Blow Your Mind!")

The reason I bring it up is an interesting study out of Japan about writing, published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. UPI reports:

Writing on paper, instead of on a tablet or smart phone, boosted the brain activity of a group of Japanese university students when they tried to recall information they'd learned an hour earlier....

"Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall," study co-author Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tokyo, said in a press release.

In addition to aiding memory formation and recall, writing on paper is also more efficient. During the study, volunteers using paper completed their learning task 25 percent faster than the university students using tablets and smart phones....

"Digital tools have uniform scrolling up and down and standardized arrangement of text and picture size, like on a webpage," Sakai said.

"But if you remember a physical textbook printed on paper, you can close your eyes and visualize the photo one-third of the way down on the left-side page, as well as the notes you added in the bottom margin," Sakai said.

This makes sense to me -- there's a lot more tactile information registered in writing by hand, including the tool and pad used and where and when they're used. Seems to me that would indeed make a lot of unintended cues useful for retaining and retrieving the information.

I find that I prefer to make notes in longhand, but for lengthy writing I'll just use the computer. My wife, on the other hand, likes to write out first drafts in longhand on a legal pad, which helps her organize her thoughts, especially with complex jobs. So when I read the report on this study, I told her she was right about yet another thing in this life. 

The study itself was only limited to testing brain function and memory with memorizable tasks, not on the quality of the writing. It used "three groups of participants who read dialogues on personal schedules and wrote down the scheduled appointments on a calendar using a paper notebook (Note), an electronic tablet (Tablet), or a smartphone (Phone)". So this was not a test of whether one wrote better short stories or poems on paper or electronic device. 

It does appear that students are missing out, thanks to all the electronic devices available. Students have to deal with notes and memorization more than the average worker. 

I've been using a keyboard to write fiction since I was old enough to use a keyboard, but I have always started to work out plot outlines by pad. If you'd asked me why, I probably wouldn't have had an answer before. Now I think it may be that I sensed the pad made for a better means of juggling information on complex plots. In the kind of things I like to write, there's lots of bits of information that come up in one place and matter later, and to keep it all afloat I have to remember them as I go. Once the outline is set, I can write everything in a Word document, because now I don't have to remember everything.

How about you? Are you a pad person, an electronics person, or do you just trust your amazing eidetic memory to keep your data in your head?