January 11, 2025 is World Sketchnote Day! Learn more about this technique in the following excerpt from Tanny McGregor's Ink & Ideas.
Across decades and disciplines, many great thinkers have held something in common: visible, visual thinking, created in notebooks, journals, and diaries and on postcards and paper scraps. Words. Pictures. Symbols. Color. Font. Intentional design decisions. When we learn about the visual notetaking habits of great thinkers, it becomes difficult to believe that sketchnoting is not taught and valued in every classroom. When we sketchnote, our in-the-moment thinking has a permanence that it might not otherwise have. When we sketchnote, we discover our own brilliance that might otherwise remain hidden. A different kind of thinking happens with pen (or stylus) in hand.
If we look back into history, we can find sketchnoters from the past: Einstein’s notebooks show how he developed his theories through sketches, notes, and diagrams. Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog started out as Jim Henson’s sketches. Jane Goodall’s observation notes include color-coded charts of her own design. But what about now? Look around. Examples of sketchnotes are everywhere: in print media and on film, on social media and in data visualizations. Teachers are even being encouraged to include sketchnoting as a response option for students, across grade levels and content areas. As we embrace sketchnoting as a viable mode of expression, let’s be sure to delve deeper into the why and not just be enamored with the how. Sketchnoting is way more than just a pretty page.
- Sketchnotes are thinking made visible.
Visible notetaking unleashes invisible thinking in words and images: it gushes forth to flood the page. No margin is safe when a sketchnoter finds a pen and gets to work. Thinking begins to appear, much like invisible ink under an ultraviolet light. Sketchnoting says to us, “Someone spent time thinking here.”
- Sketchnotes welcome linguistic and nonlinguistic representation.
The dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971) explains how powerful adding images to our thinking can be. We store information in our brains in two ways: the verbal code (language) and the nonverbal code (images and realia). Using them together maximizes the chances for recall. Sketchnoting takes the dual coding theory and lets it trickle down into the margins of our text and into our notebooks, making it useful for everyday reading and listening.
- Sketchnotes allow for student choice.
With sketchnoting, she who holds the pen holds the power. Only the thinker decides what appears on the page and how. Student choice is an indicator of best practice (Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde, 2012), and personalized notetaking allows for maximum student choice. Just as choice leads to discovery, our sketchnotes reveal our thinking to ourselves.
- Sketchnotes help strengthen the memory.
Sketchnotes aren’t about copying from the text or typing from a prepared slide. The sketchnoter takes new ideas and information and runs them through the brain, mixing and stirring with existing background knowledge to generate new thinking. Sketchnotes help us paraphrase, determine importance, summarize, and synthesize. In turn, we remember more. We remember longer. This is called “The Drawing Effect” (Wammes, Meade, and Fernandes, 2016).
- Sketchnotes make annotation thinking-intensive.
Harvard librarian Susan Gilroy advises incoming undergraduates to “make your reading thinking-intensive from start to finish.” She likens reading and notetaking to having a visual dialogue with the author. Reading or listening with pen in hand allows for thinking to be merged with the text in a concrete, sharable way…in a sort of text/thinking cocktail.
- Sketchnotes enhance focus and reduce stress.
The stress-related hormone cortisol is reduced when we create visual art (Kaimal, Ray, and Muniz, 2016). As if this isn’t great enough, the benefit is not limited to those who consider themselves to be artistic or creative. If we can reduce stress in our classrooms, let’s do it! We all deserve a relaxed, creative environment in which to flourish.
- Sketchnotes embrace design.
There are many ways to record thinking that don’t rely on the elements of design, and that’s okay. Sometimes we just need to quickly capture content or messily scribble down our thoughts before we lose them. Sketchnoting doesn’t sit in opposition to these kinds of notes. In fact, for some students, sketchnoting can be the quickest way to make an abstract idea concrete. Design decisions that include color, lettering, and style matter because they can help to make thinking more meaningful and memorable. Design adds fun, energy, and surprise to our thinking and is accessible to anyone to create or view. We connect deeply with content when design is part of the thinking equation.
Let’s give our students options to show their thinking with both pictures and words. Let’s take what research suggests about sketching and the brain to heart. Let’s recognize how sketchnoted information—a mix of words and images--affects us in advertising and social media. Let’s give our students choice in how to take notes. Let’s welcome creative expression. Let’s model our own sketchnotes and encourage our students to abandon perfectionism and celebrate thinking. A brilliant world of words and pictures awaits.
