Storing critical information in your brain takes a three-prong strategy: saying the words, reading the words and most importantly writing the words. There’s power in the simple act of writing words.
Writing locks into your memory the information that you need to remember and it’s more likely to stick in your long-term memory (WebMD June 2019).
You will remember the items on your shopping list.
Technology provides modern-day options such as cell phone apps and pictures sent to us on our cell phone from our loving partners about requests for milk and cheese and bread when we’re grocery shopping but there’s still something “magical” about the act of physically writing the words on paper that triggers our brain to store the information for later use.
You’ll remember to bring home the milk and cheese and the bread.
College students far and wide furiously type on their laptops taking lecture notes during “101” level classes to make sure that they don’t miss the “pearls of wisdom” offered by their learned professors and then glean information for upcoming tests or final exams. Imagine if the students wrote the notes by hand that way the initial information would lock into their brain.
After a great job interview send a hand-written ‘thank you’ note.
When children are taught the alphabet they repeatedly write the letters on paper or a chalkboard since this process “locks in” the alphabet process: it imprints the letters on a young child’s brain.
Police officers issuing tickets often set pen to paper.
When it’s important to remember you may want to write it down.
