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“You don’t need to take notes,” one esteemed lecturer told me and others in the crowd ahead of a highly anticipated presentation on digital publishing. “I’ll send you a PDF of this slideshow.”
I soon found myself in a sea of side-eye when I—undeterred—took out my notebook and recorded the date in the upper right-hand corner.
My mother has accused me of being an “old soul,” and perhaps it’s just a quirk of my personality that I’m keen on pen and paper, but I’m not alone. A 2014 study from researchers at Princeton and UCLA, previously cited in a July 2017 guest post on my blog, showed that taking notes by hand helps with retention in the classroom—largely, they say, because the physical note-taking process forces the listener to actively synthesize, process, and reframe the information being presented.
“The more deeply information is processed during note taking, the greater the encoding benefits,” researchers Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer reported.
If you’re like me, and the majority of the participants in Mueller and Oppenheimer’s study, then taking notes helps you better understand and recall new information—and you’re going to want the right tools for the job. As a freelance writer and editor, here are my five favorite notebooks, journals, and planners—the ones I use on a daily basis and simply can’t live without:
Continue reading “A Professional Editor’s Favorite Journals and Planners — 5 Notebooks I Use Every Day”
Shelly Rawlings 