Academics and other teachers like to write out their points in full sentences on black boards, so that students can copy them in their notebooks. This could actually be useful, the slowly spoken sentence, combined with the hand writing, gets burnt in memory easier. Also, that sentence becomes a sort of mental placeholder on the big collection of black boards. To refer back to it, you can simply circle the sentence, and the text itself reminds the audience what is meant, but more importantly, it is that “geographic location” of memories around that sentence that creates the right context.

As I ‘sat' through’ a 1.5 hour video on encryption technology of an academic lecture last week, the teacher took it to the extreme though: not making his big point before starting to write it down…. “That… makes… it….”, what will it be “possible” or “impossible”?

I would pop the suspense, before writing things down…