And I strongly disagree.

The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.

And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.

Different strokes

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?

I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?

If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."

On average, people have slightly less than two legs.

However the average person has exactly two.

That's because "average" can mean either median, mean or mode depending on context.

I might just be stretching my point... but if I remember Treasure Island (1883) correctly, the mean person had only one leg.

Sorry! I'll see myself out.