The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

His middle-school classmates would end each lesson with a more-or-less faithful record of their learning, but he was left only with educationally useless broken-off sentences in a scrawled hand, and the drawings that he couldn’t stop himself from making. And while his schoolwork suffered, Ryder was bullied by schoolmates too: it was clear that something was going badly wrong for the boy. So when the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder arrived it came as no surprise. The condition’s symptoms can include a short attention span, being easily distracted, making careless mistakes, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate on tasks, difficulty following instructions, constantly changing activity, difficulty with organisation, being unable to sit still, impatience, impulsiveness… small wonder that Ryder’s teachers were frustrated – as was he. And yet, he would find a way round the obstacles that the condition posed. Faced by a desperate need to make school bearable, the young Ryder came up with his own solution: he would make lists – not just lesson notes, but lists of everything. As he stopped trying to record everything the teachers said, the scrawled half-notes gave way to list after list. Bullet points filled his pages, and in the process he discovered that, by rephrasing ideas as economically as possible, he could train his mind to stay on topic, and follow lessons through to their conclusion. To make the notes intelligible, he trained himself to write in cap...