It occurred to me today that there’s a problem with writing things down.

I don’t know if you use lists or not, but I think that most people probably do, at least in certain circumstances. Whether it’s a to do list, to remind you of the things that you have to do, or a grocery list, to remind you of the things that you need to pick up at the grocery store, or a Christmas list, to let people know that you have certain things that you’d like to get for the holidays, using lists to keep track of things is pretty common place.

In my house, we keep these lists on the internet –> in the ‘cloud’, so to speak. This allows for the grocery list, which would normally be on the front of the refrigerator, to be accessible to the family member who just so happens to be at the store to pick up some needed supplies. Or, the kids who share their Christmas lists with their grandparents by emailing it to them, are more likely to get what’s on their list.

In addition to lists, we have other things that we write down, so that we will remember them for the future. Recipes, for example, are instructions for making a certain dish in the future –> what you need to have on hand and what to do with those ingredients in order to make the food you’d like to have. Or, take the folder that I have in my office, on a certain shelf where it is easy to get to, that says “How To” on the front. In that folder, there are a couple dozen different sets of instructions on how to do things that I do fairly often, but not often enough to have the steps memorized.

More on this in a little bit…

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A significant part of the work that my students in my Psychology class do –or at least they’re supposed to do– is to write down the notes that I post for the class, on each of the lectures, in their own handwriting. In the eight or nine years that I’ve taught Psychology in my school district, this didn’t used to be a problem. But, more and more these days, my students are opposed to doing the work –the study– of writing down the notes. Instead, they are just as likely to take a picture of the notes that I post with the cameras on their phones.

I explain it to them, at the beginning of every year in my class, and periodically throughout the class, that it is important for them to write the notes down because the process of writing these notes down actually serves to store the information in the brain in a different way than the information would be stored just by reading the notes. But, whether they just don’t believe me, or whether they don’t want to do the work, some of them don’t take the notes.

It never fails that the students who don’t write the notes do worse on the chapter tests.

Additionally, the process of preparing for the chapter tests, when we reach the ends of the chapters, is a process that primarily involves reviewing the notes that the students have taken.

I actually gave a test to my students on the Friday before Thanksgiving, over the material from the fourth chapter of the class. I had a student who didn’t do very well on the test and then, almost immediately, this student asked me if they could retake the test. When I asked the student how much they studied their notes before the test, they said, “I didn’t study the notes.”

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My wife has been reading a book and taking notes during the process. The book is a book that we both thought would be a good book for us to read and understand, a book on parenting.

Yesterday, she asked me –as she was getting closer and closer to finishing the book– if I was going to read the book when she was done with it, or if I was just going to read the notes that she took. Of course, without missing a beat, I told her that I was going to be reading her notes.

So, she gave me a little bit of a ribbing that I was just going to be reading her ‘Cliffs Notes’. Truth be told, though, she has been sharing her notes with me, now and then, throughout the process of her reading this book. As she has faithfully been about the process of writing down her thoughts, her summarizing statements, I will happily come around, once she’s finished, and be the reader of that writing.

Because she’s gone to the trouble of writing it, it would be a shame if someone didn’t read it. 

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The problem with writing things down is that, then, it has to be read in order for it to remain in the consciousness. If I write a grocery list that stays on my refrigerator, it’s never going to be able to help me at the store. If my wife takes notes during her reading of a self-help book, but if I don’t read the notes (or the book that they came from), I am not going to benefit from all of the writing that she’s done.

If, for example, the most important words ever written then go on to be read by no one, then what is the point in doing the writing in the first place. Sometimes, people don’t want to bother doing the reading. Sometimes, the writing gets reinterpreted by someone else and then that reinterpretation is what the person down the line ends up reading.

In the opening section, I brought up the idea of memory, and that writing (and reading) are even more important when it comes to things that aren’t in our memories.

I don’t need to read the dates of my children’s birthdays because I have them memorized. I don’t need to read instructions for frying an egg, because I have those steps memorized. But, those things are also not very complicated. The more complicated a thing is, the more likely you are to need to read it –and then repeatedly re-read it– to have it in your mind.

And, if I may close with an editorial comment, I feel like there are things that have left our mind, as a nation, because we’ve stopped reading them. They’re written for us to read, and we may have had them in memory, in days gone by, but now we are at a loss without those words.