Writing is thinking. We often think we understand something we’ve read or heard but then struggle to express those ideas in writing or in clear, unbroken speech. If it can’t be written out, it doesn’t count. Here technology does us a disservice. Although the digital revolution allows us to aggregate data like never before, we know less. Typing and digital recordings allow us to record things verbatim. Handwritten notes are slower, and therein lies their power. Handwritten notes force us to summarize and rephrase as we read or listen to a lecture. Current psychology suggests that taking handwritten notes for lectures and books is better than digital note taking because it forces summarizing and elaboration. The ability to review every word is not the same as learning. But if I put the idea into my own words I thus prove that I understand it, whereas digital notes can be stored verbatim without understanding and therefore with less ability to recall (Ahrens-2017, 78).
The philosopher John Searle explains it with concision, “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” Bad preaching and bad catechesis is unclear. With good reason did our orthodox fathers urge us to read our Bibles with pens in hand, creating our own outlines, connections, paraphrases, and summaries for each chapter of the Bible. In prescribing just such a method for his students, Johann Gerhard was 400 years ahead of the best-available modern neuroscientific findings about the plasticity of the brain and the formation of neural pathways (Method, p. 185). The old Socratic method generated learning by forcing elaboration, clarification, connection, and counter-argumentation. I used to feel bad asking catechumens questions to which I knew they did not (yet) have the answers. As it turns out, that is one of the most effective things a teacher can do: “If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matt. 22:45).
“The best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration” (Ahrens-2017, 89).