Taking notes in classes and meetings of any kind used to be a straightforward affair: you either took notes on paper with a pen or pencil, or you didn’t. When you were a kid, you had marble notebooks full of notes. As you moved up from grade to grade, the notebooks grew thicker, their rules narrower, their spines bound with spiral metal coils. As an adult, maybe you had a journal; at the very least, you had a legal pad.

The modern note-taker, however, is faced with a choice: handwriting notes, as discussed above, or typing notes on a device.

Typing on a laptop or tablet offers some clear benefits: typing offers a clear speed advantage for anyone even passably conversant, and immediate cloud sync means you don’t have to worry about losing your notes. And while you might puzzle over what you meant to type, you will certainly be able to read the text. Lastly, typed notes are easy to share right away.

Handwritten notes, however, offer some benefits that might make up for the relative slowness and inconvenience of the practice. There is evidence, for example, that handwriting leads to better encoding (remembering what you wrote). Better encoding means more accurate recall. And the ability to annotate and spatially interject is hard to replicate in a text editor or outliner. Some people just like it better.

But it’s a false dichotomy to say that you can’t have one without the other.

Here’s what I tried:

Notability is a note-taking app for iOS and macOS that offers iCloud sync. I attended a workshop the other day and I took a few pages of notes in Notability using the Apple Pencil. I wrote, I moved things around, I formatted with different colors. I drew lines to other sections on the page. I drew arrows to let me know that one thing led to another. I created boxes on the side with ancillary information or sidebar data. I underlined and used color to distinguish the level of importance.

It was a nice way to work.

Notability

Notability will also spit out sections of handwriting as text. I was able to select sections of the notes and then have the software recognize the characters and turn my scratch into text. I had Notability drop the text into the clipboard (you can also opt for OCR right on the page), and I pasted the result into Bear.

In Bear, I cleaned up the formatting errors that Notability made in formatting and interpreting so that it matched the content of my handwritten notes. Performing this provided a valuable review of the topics and helped me focus on what I wanted to communicate to others at work. The notes are in Bear, where I usually store meeting notes.

Bear

I can’t say that I’ll always use Notability like this. Handwriting on the iPad uses up a lot more battery than typing. I won’t always have the Pencil with me. I won’t always want to review everything. But it does allay the sneaking sensation that typing notes isn’t as effective as my old handwritten method. The printed word forces a structure on the writer: top to bottom, left to right. Sure, you can use an outliner like Omni and drag sections around, but that’s not the same thing. But the digital advantages are very real.