Clive Thompson "How The Way You Write Changes the Way You Think"

So, yeah, as the slide says, I'm Clive Thompson. I write about how people use technology and how it affects their everyday thinking. But I'm actually not here to talk about anything particularly high tech today. I'm actually here to talk about something very low tech, which is pencils and handwriting. Because this summer there was this little epidemiological outbreak of articles worrying that cursive writing was dying. You can see that story in the New York Times. There was that one, there was one in the Atlantic. And they were all arguing that if we stopped handwriting and started typing more, we became stupider. We didn't think as well. And so all my friends, because I know I write about technology, were all panicking and freaking out and emailing me and saying, am I becoming dumber because I'm typing? And I think part of the reason they asked me that is not just that I write about this stuff, but that I am a big pencil fetishist. I started about three years ago when this pencil here, the Blackwing, was reissued. The Blackwing was an incredibly famous pencil from the early 20th century. It was loved by artists and writers because it has this very dark, creamy lead. It just flows across the page so beautifully and it looks like ink. I've actually got one of them here. I bought a pack of these and I became completely addicted to the idea of just walking around and always taking notes. I became the type of person who only leaves the house if you have a pad so you can jot down little notes. I could write notes about what you guys are doing right now. Audience seems to be receptive to idea of pencils. And I started going on to pencil blogs, which turns out to be incredibly dangerous because pretty soon you're buying pencils from all over the world. These bespoke pencils from Korea, from Japan, from Canada. I became a pencil fetishist. I also became a pencil sharpener fetishist. And I started looking for the best pencil sharpener on the planet. I think I found it. I'm going to share it with you. It's that one in that picture. I have one of them right here. It's called the KUM Double Long Point Sharpener. And the reason why it works so well is that it's a two step process. The first hole just extrudes the graphite in sort of a long pole. And the second hole sharpens the lead to like a weaponized point. I've discovered that if you sharpen your pencil on the New York subway system, there are two reactions. Half the people think that it's the most charming sort of Eisenhowerian thing they've seen. You know, it's very. The other half of the people think you look like a serial killer, which makes sense. You're sort of sitting there just going, scratch. I've cleared subway trains by sharpening a pencil on the subway. So I'm very interested and passionate about pencils. But I'm also a big nerd, and I type a lot, and I type 95 words a minute. So in addition to my pencil fetish, I have a keyboard fetish, which is to say, I, like many nerds, I only buy a laptop or a keyboard if I can try out the keyboard first because it's this very kinesthetic feel to the typing. This here, I used it for years. This is the IBM model fit Clicky keyboard. It's called the clicky keyboard because every single key makes this loud click when you press it down. And if you type 95 words a minute, it sounds like a Gatling gun going off in the office. And I love the feeling of the words just sort of pouring out of me in this torrent of noise. I had to stop using it because it turns out the people in the office weren't as thrilled about the torrent of noise when I typed 95 words a minute on that thing. But the point is, I really like pencils. I really like handwriting. I. I also like typing. And so I got very interested in this question as to, is there one that's better than the other? What's the war between typing and handwriting? Which one's better for your thinking? So I spent the summer diving into the research. And what I discovered is that it isn't really so much one being better than the other. It's really which one is suited to what task. Marshall McLuhan was the one that said, the medium is the message. Whatever medium you use governs the way you think and the way you do something. And it turns out to be the same thing with typing and handwriting. So take, for example, taking notes. I see some of you out there taking notes right now, and you might wonder which one is better for taking notes. Well, a couple of scientists decided to test this. So they set up an auditorium of people. Half of them took notes on keyboard, and half of them took notes handwriting while someone spoke. And they wanted to figure out who would remember the most, who would retain the most. So they tested them afterwards. And it turns out that handwriting won hands down, pun intended. Handwriting completely won out. People understood more, they retained more. They remembered more when they wrote by Hand. Why is that? No one really knows. Maybe it's because when you write, you have to focus a little bit more on what you're doing, because you're synthesizing, you're cramming to a smaller number of words. In contrast, the people that typed were like transcriptionists. They were just trying to get every single word down so they had a more complete record of what people had said. They. But they hadn't thought in the moment about what was being said. So it seems that handwriting works for note taking. It also seems to work very well for big picture thinking. This is something that I myself have found. Whenever I'm writing a big article or a chapter in a book, or even designing this presentation, I need to work on paper to organize the flow of ideas, the architecture. This picture here is actually this notebook, me organizing this talk. You can see the little doodles are individual pictures of the slides that I drew about what I was going to talk about. And it turns out that even doodling is good for your thinking, because as people have studied doodling, Sunny Brown wrote a wonderful book, the Doodle Revolution, and she found that when people doodle, when they listen to someone talk, they actually retain and remember more of what they heard. Which is completely weird when you think about it, because you would think of doodling as a distraction. But there's something about cueing your notes and your ideas to little pictures that seems to make you recall it better. And historians who study creativity have long noticed that doodlers are often very creative people. This is a picture from Leonardo da Vinci's journals. And when you look through his journals, you see these amazing inventions that he's drawing. And there's always weird little doodles off to the side, like the face on that image. So far, the research I was finding seemed to suggest that handwriting is better. Right? Handwriting is winning, except the picture changes. When time comes to write something down and produce knowledge for other people, that's when it shifts over to typing and specifically, fast typing. Fast typing is significant because of something that psychologists who study composition called transcription fluency. Stephen Graham is a scholar of literacy. He described it once to me this way. You can think of the ideas in your head as rushing along, and you're trying to transcribe them onto the page. And the faster you can do that when you're in the act of writing, the. The less likely it is that words and ideas will escape and get away from you. A cautionary tale of that is this poor guy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He's a poet from the romantic tradition. And he went to sleep one day under the influence of a lot of opium, which is what you did back then. And he had this incredible dream and he woke up and he had this amazing poem and it said Kubla Khan. And he started writing it down and writing it down, but he couldn't go fast enough because he was interrupted. And when he went back to it, the poem was gone. It's a famously incomplete poem. And so transcription fluency is about reducing the bottleneck between what's inside your head when you're racing along and trying to get your ideas out and to iterate them. And what scientists have studied, that if you actually increase people's typing speed, you increase the quality of their writing down. In Australia, a couple of researchers took a bunch of sort of 13 year olds who were struggling in school. They weren't very good students, and they scored them on their essay writing and they were not that great at writing essays. Then they did an experiment. They took half of them and they gave them touch typing lessons for eight weeks to get their typing speed up. And the other half, they just left them alone. At the end of eight weeks, they had them write essays again. And this time the ones that had been taught touch typing that could type more quickly scored 40% better than they had before. They were using longer sentences, more complicated vocabulary, and bigger ideas. And why is that? Have they suddenly become smarter over eight weeks? No, it's just that the bottleneck, the transcription fluency bottleneck, between what was already in their heads and what was on the page was evaporating. When you teach people to type, you teach them to think. When you teach them to type faster, it helps them get their ideas out. Michael Russell is a researcher here in Massachusetts. He looked at Massachusetts students across the entire state and he found the same thing. There was a strong correlation between how fast they could type and, and how well they were doing at school. He even sort of hypothesized that there's kind of a minimum speed at which if you can type that quickly, transcription fluency problems go away. And he sort of playfully hypothesized that it would be about 24 words a minute. So you can go online and do a typing test and find out if you are 24 words a minute or faster. If you are, you're probably in OK shape. Although, as he says, faster is better because it unlocks the iterative joy of writing, the ability to sort of race along, to sketch an idea, to go back and change it, and to move back and forth as you move, and that's really what helps you when you're trying to get an idea out. So ultimately, what I've sort of come to the conclusion as I looked at all this research, was that there's no individual tool that's perfect for any situation. What we really need is a lot of different cognitive tools in our toolkit. We need to be able to move back and forth between one mode or another based on the type of work that we're trying to do that day. There's actually a word for this. Psychologists call it metacognition, which is thinking about your thinking. So every day when you go to work, you should be thinking, what am I trying to do today? Am I trying to absorb knowledge? Am I taking notes from reading or listening? In that case, you should be using handwriting. Am I trying to produce knowledge? Am I trying to get something out there? Am I trying to persuade someone with an amazing email or a presentation or a speech? Well, then you should be typing and typing quickly. So what I'm going to try and leave you with as you head out of here and go into the rest of your life, is to think that when it comes to writing and thinking, there's two things you should be doing, which is type as quickly as you can and always carry a pencil. Thank you.