When I was just starting my current startup (a collaborative note-taking platform), I pored over a lot of studies on this subject because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to build a digital knowledge base / note-taking solution I would give our users their best shot at actually remembering what they were storing.
In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes.
As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go.
This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening.
The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built.
But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!
In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes.
As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go.
This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening.
The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built.
But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!