Article: Bad handwriting helps you remember more!

I always wondered why I did not have a good handwriting and now the mystery is solved in a study by Princeton University. In an article titled "Fortune favors the Bold and Italicized: Effect of disfluency on Education Outcome", the university explain how different fonts affect the way in which we remember things.


In this interesting article, they explain how hard-to-read fonts were better remembered than easier to read information. That will explain the reason why my handwriting was always hard to read, it was a well planned activity my brain to retain as much as possible in memory. It did affect me at times to even read my own handwriting, but that is a separate story.


The article says that some of the easier fonts that are clear and legible tend to have less memory retention and fonts like Comic Sans, because of the nature of the font are not that easy to read and hence has more cognitive operations. The article goes further in saying that harder fonts eventually lead to higher memory performance and even better education results in the process.


Some people have extrapolated the scope of this article and compared the effects of reading from eReaders to traditional books. Most of the eReaders offer the flexibility of fonts, but they do not include any of these hard-to-read fonts. The premise of eReaders is to make reading easy, so the fonts are simple and hence the claim is that people will tend to remember less in this case. I have been using eReaders primarily for reading novels and I have not seen any major difference in my limited time with these devices and personally don't care if I forget some of the finer details in the novel.


If we compare eReaders and books, then we also need to compare how we get information these days. We rely on our gadgets like Computers, Smart Phones and eReaders to get most of the news and current events and they are all presented in a simple to read fashion, does this mean that we are getting affected by this?


My take on this overall scenario is that, if reading on a simple-to-read format is going to make me lose focus or reduce my attention time, then I am going to lose my memory retention. If we do any activity with focus and attention then we will be able to remember as required. 


I agree with the report that in lot of cases, making neural associations affects you at a sub-conscious level in remembering and retaining information. Fonts are just one way of making the neural association and there are many other ways to achieve the same effect. When I was preparing for my exams, I used to have music or something on the TV. I would not pay attention to it, but helped me make some connections. During the exams I used to make connections with some questions and the music that I registered subconsciously. While this technique worked for me, I had some friends who could not have any distraction what so ever. For them reading aloud or walking while reading or doing some physical action did the trick. 


Bottom line: Pick your way to improve your memory, if fonts make the difference for you then good for you. This way you dont have to work hard on your handwriting anymore


Author: Vinod
Source: Gizmodo, Princeton University Article