The benefits of writing things down.

Thoughts on how martial artists can hold on to valuable information.

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

We all process information in different ways, whether it involves learning things on the spot or recalling what we have learned. I want to focus on this second one; recall.

I have never been entirely confident with my power of recall, although I am told I have a very good memory, the problem is that it is overcrowded with trivia. My favoured method is just writing things down. I have been doing this for years; forty-odd notebooks full of ‘stuff’, admittedly not all of it karate related, but recently going back through some of the early ones from the 70’s I am surprised how much of my thoughts were entirely occupied by karate.

To this day one of my measures of how good a course or class I have been to is how many pages of notes I have to write up afterwards. Now I know this might sound like a chore but it’s only much further down the line you realise how valuable these are.

I remember talking to my Sensei about this a few years ago; he asked me why I bother? He says that it is better to directly observe what is in front of you and try to get to the essence of what is going on. The implication was not to get distracted by the detail, the technique being shown, but look towards the underlying principles. Of course, he was right, but I fear he overestimates me, I am not that gifted. Instead, I need some kind of framework to hang those ‘principles’ on. Yes, I do get the ‘principle’ thing, I’m not merely collecting techniques, I know people who do collect, but unless the substrate of principles are operating within the techniques these ‘collections’ are meaningless, mere curiosity pieces and would never work.

Looking back on the notes years later elicits several reactions from me; one being that things that were new to me then seems so very obvious now, another being that I realise how I misinterpreted what was going on because I coloured it with my own bias. But perhaps the most positive observations are when you realise that you have mislaid some quite important aspects and then things start to become more joined-up in the light of what you know now.

I often used to supplement the notes with drawings, some of which I include in this post. The examples of my drawings here come from various adventures including the time when I was training with Okinawan Goju Ryu people, working on Hojo Undo with the Chishi to supplement the type of training I was doing at that time.

I recognise now that people use more up-to-date methods of recording things, more useful and editable than pen and paper. One of the more recent pre-Covid courses I went on had a whole group of really keen students staying behind after training and recording pairs work they wanted to remember on their phones. I have done that myself, but I still feel a need to write things down in whatever medium I think does the job. My reasons are that the act of writing something down gives you the opportunity to order your thoughts and pursue things in logical progressions; part of the reason I write these posts is not for my audience – it’s for me. I end up having a discussion with myself, putting up arguments and then knocking them down again if they don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The notes clearly support your recall. I was teaching Tanto Dori on a course recently and I knew exactly where to lay my hands on the reminder notes; the quirky anecdotes, the supporting information, the quotes that certain Sensei had said about particular parts of techniques, etc.

My own collection of notebooks.

These are my give-away pointers, things that help me and might help others.

·       Get disciplined. Write/record it while it’s fresh. A habit I have, if I am coming back from a course from airport to airport is to write the stuff while I am on the plane (I am getting quite good at writing while the plane is experiencing turbulence). After all, what else are you going to do on a flight?

·       As soon as possible after you have written it down, find some space and actually physically practice/rehearse it. Doing that helps to cement it into your physical memory.

·       Record them in a way that you can understand them – sometimes I have written things and then later on go, ‘what the heck did I mean by that?’ Longhand is better, even though it’s more work.

·       Linked to the above point; if you have the skill and inclination, support the notes with diagrams.

·       Make a note of any ‘lightbulb moments’. You might have made some links to things you have done before – with Wado, and I am sure with other styles, it’s amazing how bits of knowledge tend to link themselves together; or the key of one small insight opens many other doors. If you don’t note them down, it’s surprising how they slip away.

·       Experiment with different mediums; but don’t grasshopper around, you will lose track of where you wrote what. If you are a ‘notebook person’ stay with the notebooks. It took me a while to find the right heavy-duty, handy notebooks. My current preferred brand is Moleskine, they are more pricey but the two advantages they have are that they are tough and that they are reassuringly expensive, their value seems to subconsciously add value to what you are putting into them.

·       Don’t be too quick to dismiss the digital medium. Confession time; after a lot of research, I decided to start storing notes on Evernote (more on that below). Evernote for me is a supplementary to the written notes.

Evernote.

I used Evernote at work because it was a great way to store my student’s assessments and photographs of ongoing projects.

I could create separate ‘notes’ sitting in Notebooks, I could stack the Notebooks into categories – it made life so much easier.

I have since refined how I use Evernote. During lockdown, when I was running Zoom sessions, I had over 80 handwritten crib notes; every time I finished the session, I snapped the picture of the notes straight into Evernote so I had them archived. Because I was forced into a frenzy of creativity for these Zoom sessions, I didn’t want to lose what I’d done, so I stacked these snapped documents into Evernote. If I am planning for future courses I can dip into the themes of these Zoom sessions and construct the content in an intelligent way. I know this sounds somewhat obsessive, but for me it works.

In addition, Evernote has the capacity to create ‘tags’ making it easily searchable (the Tags helped to organise the Zoom notes).

Reviewing your knowledge.

It’s a bit like the range of techniques you have stacked up as your go-to sparring strategies; the set-pieces that you pull out of your pocket when you really need them. If you don’t review them, they slip away. Over the years I developed (or stole) so many of these I am not so sure I can hold them in my own head – sometimes they surprise me by just happening spontaneously, at other times I have really draw upon my reserves.

An example; many years ago, the then England squad coach Eddie Cox taught me a lovely technique, I will call it a ‘skip sweep’. The idea is that you tempt your opponent into stepping into your space by encouraging him to lunge for your head with his lead hand and instead of stepping back you execute a lead hand coverage (inwards) and at exactly the same time switch your legs in a sweeping action to catch his front leg on the outside; if you can pull it off it’s a peach of a technique. There is a useful sweep that Welsh fighter Ashley Evans was fond of using which I adapted; I call it a ‘draw and drag’ sweep, which is disguised when just seemingly changing angle. There are so many of these you have to figure a way of keeping them alive in your memory.

Conclusion.

I fully understand that everyone processes information in their own way, in no way am I suggesting that everyone approaches this issue the same way that I do – whatever works for you. But, there may be people out there who kinda use methods similar to the ones mentioned above, we can all learn from each other. Maybe my methods appear a little obsessive but they have served me well.