Reading/Writing Learning Style: Learning by Writing It Down

Reading/writing style: when writing helps you think

People whose predominant style is reading/writing retain information better when they read it and, above all, when they reorganize it in writing using their own words: notes, summaries, lists.

For them, writing isn’t just a passive record: it’s an active part of how they process and understand information. It’s common for this to combine with the visual style, taking notes that mix text and diagrams.

Translating everything into your own words

Receiving information in writing is only half the picture: some models look at a different question than the channel, which stage of the learning process you’re most comfortable in. Systematizing a topic in writing, looking for the logical structure of the ideas, fits well with the “theorist” style Peter Honey and Alan Mumford described based on David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle: people who prefer to analyze and integrate information into coherent frameworks and models before applying it. The two approaches don’t compete: you can be reading/writing in how you process information and, at the same time, more active or more reflective in how you approach the learning process as a whole.

Signs that point to this style

Faced with a new manual for a piece of software or a tool, someone with this style will probably prefer to read the documentation and take their own notes rather than watch a video tutorial covering the exact same thing. The pattern repeats on several fronts:

• They prefer reading over listening to or watching a video about the same content.
• They take extensive notes naturally, even when it isn’t strictly necessary to remember something.
• They organize their ideas better in writing than mentally or out loud.

The VARK model links this style to rewriting information in your own words, building hierarchical lists and summaries, and keeping an active study notebook, not just as a record but as a thinking tool while you learn.

Writing to turn experience into real learning

Investor Ray Dalio sums up, in his book Principles: Life and Work (2017), a formula he applied throughout his career: pain plus reflection equals progress. Every time something went wrong, he forced himself to write down what had happened and what general principle he could draw from it, instead of just feeling the frustration and moving on. Over the years, that habit of writing down his reflections turned into an archive of principles that guided his later decisions. It’s practically the same mechanism that makes the reading/writing style work so well: writing isn’t just a record of what you learned, it’s the very tool that produces the learning. Rewriting in your own words what went wrong, or what you understood about a new topic, serves that same function of turning a loose experience into a reusable principle.

Why rewriting works better than rereading

Psychologists Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed a distinction that explains why this style works so well: not all information gets processed at the same depth. Rereading a paragraph several times is what they call maintenance rehearsal: it keeps the information active for a while, but barely leaves a trace afterward. Rewriting it in your own words, on the other hand, is elaborative rehearsal: it forces you to connect the new idea with what you already know, decide what matters, and rephrase it, and that extra depth is precisely what makes it easier to retrieve later from long-term memory.

That’s why “running your eyes over your notes” the night before an exam does so little for this style: without active reformulation, the information barely gets processed at any depth. The real effort of turning an idea into your own words, not how many times you look at it, is what fixes it in place.

Sources

• Fleming, N. D., & Mills, C. (1992). Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection. To Improve the Academy.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice-Hall.
• Honey, P., & Mumford, A. (1986). The Manual of Learning Styles.
• Dalio, R. (2017). Principles: Life and Work. Simon & Schuster.
• Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: a framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.