Why Writing Lines Really IS Punishment
Last updated on January 20th, 2020 at 8:57 am
Are you old enough to remember, at school, being made to stay in and write lines, as some sort of atonement for a misdemeanour? And, if you’re still writing on lines, when making revision notes, you’re punishing yourself! This article shows you a better way to make your brain wake up to the information you’re trying to learn.
Written by Lysette Offley
Plain paper is much more effective than lined paper when making your revision notes.
Why?
Because, the problem with lined paper is that it encourages you to write in a linear fashion from left to right, starting at the beginning of the line and not moving on to the next until you have filled the one before. It doesn’t encourage you to use symbols, shapes, colours, space, bullet points, numbers, pictures etc – all the things that make your revision easy to recall.
Scientists tell us we can learn 6 times faster by using our visual skills.
Frankly, I’ve no idea how they work that out, but suffice to say – when it comes to processing and retaining visual information, boy, we’re gooood!
There’s always something more interesting than textbook learning
Our evolution means that we’re not overly interested in the sort of learning we try to do from textbooks. There are far more exciting, interesting, essential and more rewarding things to attend to instead!
Like going to the pub with your mates!
And so, unless you can get your brain’s attention and interest, you’re going to doze off, or find something else to do, something really important or fun, that needs doing now.
Like emptying the dishwasher!
OK, maybe not more fun, but certainly a lot less hard work!
Plain paper is much more effective than lined paper when making your revision notes. Share on X
A Quick Way To Make Your Brain Pay Attention
So you need to get your brain to pay attention and deliberately ‘suck’ up the info you want to learn.
One quick and obvious way to do this is by making it stand out visually – especially the bits that seem to be taking more effort to get into your brain.
Visual tricks might include, for example, making part of it bigger, a different colour, make it look peculiar, rude or funny. You could draw a silly association with it, or distort its meaning – whatever it takes to bring your visual attention to it.
Nowadays it takes longer for the message to get through
It wasn’t long ago that the marketing profession calculated that it took an average of 7 times of exposure to a message, for someone to respond to it. But all that’s changed.
We’re continually bombarded with information, often multi-sensory, multimedia experiences, and they now believe it takes 11 times for a marketing message to break through to our awareness and for us to take action!
With all that competition for your attention, of course, you have to do something to make your brain wake up to the information you’re trying to learn.
And using plain paper encourages you to get visually creative, thus speeding up how fast you can learn, and perhaps more importantly, remember what you’ve learned.
Do you use plain paper or lined?
