Handwritten vs. Typed Notes: Which Is Really Better?

Taking notes by handwriting vs. typing: which is really better?

  • By Sander Tamm
  • Mar 24, 2021

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  • The debate over whether handwritten notes or digitally typed notes are more helpful for learning is never-ending.
  • While some swear by handwriting everything they learn, others say typing allows them to better retain the information.
  • In this article, we’ll analyze both sides of the spectrum.

In 1974, researchers  Palmatier and Bennett  conducted one of the largest-ever studies on student note-taking. In their study, the researchers expressed concern over modern technology impacting the note-taking habits of students.

What kind of modern technology were they worried about in 1974?

Spiral-bound notebooks.

That’s right. Boring old spiral-bound notebooks.

What seemed like a disruptive technology less than 50 years ago is now the “traditional” medium of note-taking.

Spiral-bound notebook and a laptop

Coming back to today, the laptop is a more disruptive technology than the notebook ever was. 

However, is it a good disruption, or a bad disruption?

In this guide, I’ll be analyzing that very question, by comparing handwriting and typing from various standpoints, together with giving my final personal opinion on which is better.

In this guide, the following comparisons between handwritten and typed notes will be made.

Comparing Notes

Handwriting vs. typing: taking the notes.

In scientific literature, the learning that takes place during the note-taking process is often called the  encoding function . The encoding function encompasses only the act of note-taking itself. That is – does the act of note-taking by itself, without any reviewing, provide any benefits to knowledge acquisition? 

One study, conducted by Kobayashi,  seems to suggest that yes – there is a positive encoding (although moderate) effect from note-taking. A highly cited study conducted by  Kiewra in 1985  also revealed the same, with note-taking students (who did not review their notes) performing slightly better than students who didn’t take any notes.

Thus, we can conclude that there are benefits to the act of note-taking itself.

Now, if we go back to the handwritten vs. typed notes debate, this aspect is one of the most commonly discussed in scientific papers. Many of the studies around the benefits of handwritten notes focus on this specific aspect – the value of handwritten encoding.

Here’s what the research says:

Thus, it appears that for the encoding aspect of taking notes, the upper hand goes to handwriting.

Handwriting vs. Typing: Editing the Notes

One major benefit of typing and digital note-taking is that you can easily edit your notes after class. Handwritten notes also have some room for corrections, but the more you edit them, the messier and harder to review they usually get.

By having your notes stored inside a digital file you can edit, copy, resize, and move the sentences around however you deem fit. This also makes using after-class  note-taking methods  such as the  charting method ,  mapping method , and  boxing method  much easier, because you can simply cut and paste your notes instead of having to rewrite them.

While a one-on-one repetition of note-taking is not an effective study method, the act of restructuring your notes into a more digestible and reviewable format after class is a powerful technique. Not only will you be using semantic processing while changing the notes, but you’ll also be summarizing the information and learning during the process.

When it comes to editing notes after-class, typing takes a comfortable win.

Handwriting vs. Typing: Memorization

When it comes to memorization, studies seem to suggest that handwriting outperforms typing. In essence, it’s because we remember the words that we write down by hand more accurately than by typing them. While there are some studies that present opposing views, most studies have found handwriting to be better for memorization than typing.

Here’s what the research says about memorization for handwriting and typing:

According to a  2012 study , students with a poor working memory may benefit from transcribing using a computer.

Handwriting vs. Typing: Distractions & Multitasking

An unquestionable drawback to digital note-taking and typing on laptops is the ease of distraction. Studies have shown that students who use laptops during class multitask an average of  17 minutes out of every 75 minute  class period. During class, 81% of students check their email, 68% use instant messaging, 43% browse the Internet, and 25% play games.

Here’s what the research says about digital distractions and multitasking:

This point concludes with a major win for handwriting.

Handwriting vs. Typing: Note Organization

The ability to organize your notes is a topic that does not tend to get covered in note-taking research that often. However, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important topics in the handwritten vs. typed notes debate.

From personal experience, I have found that efficiently organizing dozens of physical notebooks is nearly impossible in the long-term.

Time and time again, I have been in situations where I had to find an important piece of information that I had written down in a notebook somewhere. However, more often than not, it took me too long to find what I was looking for and I had to give up before finding the note I was searching for.

With digital notes, that’s not a problem. 

By using a combination of free tools (such as Obsidian, Notion, and Simplenote) to organize all my notes, I can quickly search my entire database of typed notes and find what I’m looking for within seconds. 

By choosing typing over handwriting, I may lose  comprehension ,  complex memory traces , and efficient encoding. However, what I gain is essentially a personal knowledge search engine.

Some might argue that efficient personal knowledge management can also be accomplished with handwritten notes. That’s true, but it’s much more complicated. Unless you’re  Niklas Luhmann  with hundreds of notebook drawers, you’re more than likely going to lose your physical notes sooner or later. This means that any knowledge recorded in those notes will be lost and forgotten.

When it comes to organizing notes in the long-term, typing is a clear winner.

Which is better: Handwritten or typed notes?

It appears that based on the sections above, handwriting came out on top as the winner 3:2.

Indeed, there are many  benefits to taking notes by hand . Writing notes by hand is better for memorization, semantic processing, and encoding. Physical notebooks are also not nearly as distracting as laptops and they don’t cause feelings of wealth inequality between students.

Yet, at the end of the day, I will continue to type all my notes digitally.

The benefits of note organization on digital devices are something I cannot pass up, and having the ability to easily edit my notes after-class is also very valuable for me.

At the same time, I do recognize the benefits of longhand writing and I think that a modern blend of physical notebooks and digital devices can be one of the most powerful solutions in the coming years. Tablet devices with digital stylus pens can replicate many of the advantages of handwriting while retaining the efficiency of typed notes.

At the same time, we need to be wary of the many drawbacks of digital devices. These devices are constantly fighting for our attention, and attention hijacking is dangerous to the learning process. If we can remove these digital distractions from the equation, I believe digital note-taking tools have the potential to be far superior to handwriting.

Ultimately, I want all my notes to forever stay with me in a searchable form, and that is my main motivator for choosing typing over handwriting. Ultimately, though,  taking effective notes  is achievable with both methods.

Sander Tamm

Sander Tamm

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Handwriting vs typing notes

Laptop? Or notepad? We take a look at current research to show you the most effective way to take notes.

Handwriting vs typing notes

Wondering whether to pack your laptop for your next class?

We know there’s a lot of information out there about learning with tech, so we thought we’d answer a pretty basic question - is it better to type or write your notes?

Thankfully, there’s been plenty of research into this topic in recent years.

We’ve broken it down for you in a quick comparison.

First, a few quick facts about note taking

No matter whether you write or type your notes, it’s worth keeping a few points in mind, not least the importance of note taking itself for learning.

The benefits of handwritten and typed notes

Handwritten notes.

There’s evidence that taking notes by hand helps encode information into your long term memory better than other methods.

By taking notes on paper, you’re forcing your mind to work a little harder with the information you’re facing. Because you can’t write fast enough to get everything down by hand, you tend to summarize key points, which can help with your conceptual understanding of the subject.

In other words, the limitations of handwritten notes make learners naturally follow a more effective note taking process, based on summary and interpretation.

Typed notes

You can type at a much faster rate than writing, making laptop note taking the most efficient method for note taking. And because capturing more notes is better for learning, you can use this to your advantage.

Using digital programs makes it much easier to keep your notes organised and searchable than using a notebook, too. This will really help you out when you’re reviewing your notes later on.

Handwriting vs typing notes

The drawbacks of handwritten and typed notes

You’ll miss a lot of important information writing notes by hand. You’ll never be able to keep up with everything that’s being said, so you need to have a very effective method to get the most from class.

Another problem you may come across is collating your notes. Keeping everything together is one thing, but making sure your notes are useful for study is another, and you’ll need to do both to make note taking worthwhile in the long run.

Studies show that students tend to transcribe the professor’s words when typing notes. This captures more material, but it’s less useful for understanding the subject on a conceptual level. Typing notes in this way causes shallower information processing than handwritten notes.

For this reason, it’s assumed that typing notes is automatically less effective than writing. That’s not necessarily true (if you take the right approach).

Handwriting vs typing notes

The verdict

Looking at the pros and cons, one thing becomes a little clearer; your note taking needs to follow a process that plays to its strengths for learning.

Handwritten notes help note takers process information at a higher level. And typed notes help learners capture more information . Both of these advantages are critical to deep learning of lecture material.

Just as the drawback of writing notes - the speed you can do it - pushes you to process new information more effectively, the advantage of typed notes can be detrimental to learning if transcribing a lecture is all you’re doing.

What you really need is a mix of both these approaches - a note taking method that allows you to properly digest what’s being said, while capturing more material to review when it really counts.

So how can you ensure you’re processing information properly while capturing everything you need?

Note taking for better learning

Note taking is just as much about process as it is about the content of the notes themselves.

If you want to take notes that’ll really improve your learning, it helps to have a simple process to take, review and use your notes - one that’s easy to follow and stick to, and proven to get you the results you need.

We call ours CORI.

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Handwriting vs. Typing: How to Choose the Best Method to Take Notes

Writing notes by hand versus typing them up on a laptop.

A common question people ask is whether you should write notes by hand or type them up on a computer.

In short, studies generally show that writing notes by hand allows you to remember the material better than typing it. However, when it comes to actually choosing which method you should use, the answer is more complicated than that, since there are situations where typing your notes could be better than writing them by hand.

Accordingly, in the following article, you will see how each note-taking method affects the way you remember the material, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each method, how you can counteract some of those disadvantages, and how to decide which note-taking method is best for you.

Note-taking and your memory

In general, research shows that taking notes by hand allows you to remember the material better than typing those notes on a computer. This has been demonstrated in a number of studies on the topic, ranging from those which examined memory in general, to those which examined note-taking methods in a classroom setting. For example:

In the case of taking notes during lectures, the main issue with typing is that people are more predisposed to engage in verbatim note-taking when they type, in comparison with when they write their notes by hand. This means that when using a laptop, people tend to just type whatever the speaker or lecturer says, in a way that involves a relatively shallow cognitive processing of the material.

In comparison, writing down the material by hand usually involves a more in-depth processing of the material, since people tend to give more consideration to which parts of the material they should write down, as opposed to just transcribing everything the speaker says word-for-word.

Being aware of this issue might allow you to take better notes while typing, as long as you can successfully summarize and rephrase the material while typing, instead of just transcribing it verbatim.

However,  testing shows that in most cases, telling students to avoid taking verbatim notes when typing doesn’t actually lead to an improvement in their note-taking ability.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to improve if you actively work on how you take notes, especially if you dedicate yourself to it in the long-term, but it does mean that you should be wary, and honestly ask yourself whether taking notes on a computer is hindering your learning.

Factors to consider when deciding how to take notes

Conceptual versus factual learning.

The way in which you’re expected to interact with the material that you’re learning matters when choosing which note-taking method to use.

Specifically, you should consider whether you’re expected to engage in  conceptual   learning , which involves reaching a thorough understanding of the underlying concepts in the material, or where you’re expected to engage in  factual learning , which involves memorizing specific details in the material.

The advantages of taking notes by hand are more significant in the case of conceptual learning, since it requires deeper processing of the material compared to factual learning, which only necessitates a shallow interaction with the material.

Accordingly, if you’re taking notes for a subject which requires conceptual understanding of the material, then you should be more predisposed to taking notes by hand, as opposed to typing them on a computer. Conversely, if you’re taking notes for a subject which requires factual understanding of the material, then you should be less concerned with the cognitive benefits of writing notes by hand.

Access and distractions

Choosing to type your notes means that you end up working primarily using an electronic device, which gives you access to a lot of tools while you take notes. This can be either beneficial or detrimental to your learning.

The advantage of having access to such tools while you take notes is that you can look things up during the lecture if the speaker is unclear, or if you want to examine supplemental material.

The disadvantage  of having access to more tools while you take notes is that you also have access to a lot more distractions. This can be detrimental to your learning, since multitasking on your laptop during lectures has been shown to significantly hinder students’ learning.

You can try and mitigate the issues which are associated with working on your computer, by doing things such as by blocking your access to sites or programs which you know might distract you, though this doesn’t always work.

At the same time however, keep in mind that writing notes by hand doesn’t mean that you don’t have access to any distractions. For example, if you tend to constantly check your phone when you’re not on your computer, then you might encounter similar issues when taking notes by hand as you would when typing them on a computer.

Overall, this means that you need to be self-aware and reflective when thinking which note-taking platform will allow you to concentrate better. Furthermore, regardless of which platform you end up choosing, you should make sure to minimize external distractions as much as possible, whenever those distractions hinder your ability to learn.

Length and type of text

Writing notes by hand tends to make you more succinct, since people can generally type faster than they can write. This can be an advantage, since it means that you only include the more important aspects of the material in your notes. However, if you are forced to be so brief that you omit details that are more minor but still necessary, then this brevity can become an issue.

In comparison with writing notes by hand, typing notes allows you to write down more details, though the disadvantage of writing too much is that you might end up drowning in unnecessary details, which could make it more difficult to study from those notes later on.

Therefore, you should decide whether you will benefit more from being brief and concise, or from covering all the details which are mentioned during the lecture. This also has to do with how you’re expected to know the material (i.e. conceptual vs. factual understanding), as we previously saw.

In addition, keep in mind that:

Preferences and study technique

Sometimes you may not feel comfortable writing notes by hand, because doing so might be too slow, or because you’re not familiar enough with the material in order to process it during the lecture. In such cases, typing the notes might be a preferable option to writing them down by hand.

Similarly, if you rely on going over the material after the lecture in order to learn it, whether a few days later when you’re doing homework or months later right before an exam, then it can be beneficial to produce more comprehensive notes by typing, even if it comes at the cost of not processing the material as much as when you’re writing them by hand.

Practical benefits of digital notes

There are a few advantages to typing your notes on a computer as opposed to writing them by hand, which are not directly related to your memory and learning ability, but which are still important to consider:

These are all things that don’t directly influence your learning ability, but which you should still take into account when deciding whether to write notes by hand or type them on a computer.

Figuring out what works for you

As with any similar decision, there are a lot of variables to consider when it comes to choosing which method is best for you, so it’s impossible to say that one note-taking method will work better for everyone.

Furthermore, different note-taking methods might work better in different scenarios, and this depends both on the nature of the material that you need to learn, as well as on the way you will utilize your notes later.

Accordingly, when deciding how to take notes, you should try things out for yourself and find out which method works better for you. Nevertheless, the following guidelines can help you figure out which note-taking method will generally be preferable in which case:

Taking notes by hand works best when you want to fully process the material as you’re writing it down. It’s especially helpful when you’re expected to achieve a conceptual understanding of the material, when you need to focus on the most important aspects of the material, and when the material you need to write down isn’t convenient to type up on a computer.

The main issue with writing things by hand is that it generally takes longer, which can be problematic if you can’t write fast enough to keep up with the speaker, or if you end up being so concise that you omit critical information.

Typing your notes works best if there is a lot of material that you need to write down, and taking notes by hand isn’t convenient or fast enough. You tend to process the material less as you’re typing it, especially if you end up just transcribing everything verbatim, so you will probably have to rely more on going over the material after you finish taking the notes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and depends on your overall study technique.

Other advantages of digital notes are that they’re easier to edit and fix, easier to search through, and are more reliable in terms of backups. However, working on a digital device could potentially open you up to more distractions, which is detrimental to your learning if you’re not careful.

Summary and conclusions

Other articles you may find interesting:

For More Effective Studying, Take Notes With Pen and Paper

Handwriting might be a lost art, but educators should make sure it lives on in the classroom.

According to a new study , Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University and UCLA Los Angeles respectively, students who write out their notes by hand actually learn more than those to type their notes on laptops. Over the course of several experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer tested students’ memories for factual detail, conceptual comprehension, and synthesizing capabilities after half of them took notes by hands and the other half took notes by way of computer. Students who used laptops cranked out more words than hand-writers did, but the hand-writers ended up with a stronger conceptual understanding across the board.

writing notes by hand vs typing

Here’s Cindi May writing for Scientific American:

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What drives this paradoxical finding? Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

What’s surprising is that even when students were warned of the risks of verbatim note-taking, their electronic notes still demonstrated the same amount of rote dictation as pen-to-paper documentation did. Does that suggest handwriting’s universal advantage over laptops?

Some scientists are reportedly skeptical of the findings, wondering if the effects are overstated. Typing notes on a screen does have its benefits. Electronic documents can lend themselves to better organizational formatting. Moreover, when it comes time to revisit electronic notes later, some students might find the flexible format beneficial. On a laptop, notetakers can delete, reorder, and build on ideas with a simple click or keystroke. But on paper, that kind of fluid assimilation and rearrangement of concepts just isn’t possible. Syncing between devices can make notes ultra-portable, too—and search options available on laptops make studying more efficient.

writing notes by hand vs typing

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Writing by hand can also lend itself to verbatim note-taking too, though—especially if educators couple their lectures with wordy PowerPoint presentations or dense textbook readings. Depending on what kind of learner a student is, those simultaneous visual cues might make passive dictation easier, resulting in less long-term retention.

The study does indicate the importance of note-taking overall, though, no matter the medium:

These findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before class. Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words. Indeed, students may take very minimal notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to engage in the mental work that supports learning.

Twenty years ago, cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork called this phenomenon “ desirable difficulty ,” the idea that making learning harder can help information stick. If teachers required students to take their own notes or (on top of that) requested that they handwrite them, students could perform better on tests—and they might even feel empowered to be more creative throughout the learning process, too. Some combination of handwritten and typed notes could also expedite the learning process and illustrate the power of engaging with material in more ways than one.

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fountain pen handwriting

Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?

I n the past few days you may well have scribbled out a shopping list on the back of an envelope or stuck a Post-it on your desk. Perhaps you added a comment to your child’s report book or made a few quick notes during a meeting. But when did you last draft a long text by hand? How long ago did you write your last “proper” letter, using a pen and a sheet of writing paper? Are you among the increasing number of people, at work, who are switching completely from writing to typing?

No one can say precisely how much handwriting has declined, but in June a British survey of 2,000 people gave some idea of the extent of the damage. According to the study, commissioned by Docmail , a printing and mailing company, one in three respondents had not written anything by hand in the previous six months. On average they had not put pen to paper in the previous 41 days. People undoubtedly write more than they suppose, but one thing is certain: with information technology we can write so fast that handwritten copy is fast disappearing in the workplace.

In the United States they have already made allowance for this state of affairs. Given that email and texting have replaced snail mail, and that students take notes on their laptops, “cursive” writing – in which the pen is not raised between each character – has been dropped from the Common Core Curriculum Standards, shared by all states. Since 2013 American children have been required to learn how to use a keyboard and write in print. But they will no longer need to worry about the up and down strokes involved in “joined-up” writing, less still the ornamental loops on capitals.

This reform prompted lively controversy. In an editorial published on 4 September 2013, the Los Angeles Times hailed a step forward. “States and schools shouldn’t cling to cursive based on the romantic idea that it’s a tradition, an art form or a basic skill whose disappearance would be a cultural tragedy. Of course, everyone needs to be able to write without computers, but longhand printing generally works fine […] Print is clearer and easier to read than script. For many, it’s easier to write and just about as fast.”

Some states, such as Indiana, have decided to go on teaching cursive writing in school. Without this skill, they assert, young Americans will no longer be able to read birthday cards from their grandparents, comments by teachers on their assignments or the original, handwritten text of the constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “I have to tell you, I can’t remember the last time I read the constitution,” countered Steve Graham, a professor of education at Arizona State University.

This minor revolution is causing quite a stir but it is by no means the first of its kind. Ever since writing was most likely first invented, in Mesopotamia in about 4000BC, it has been through plenty of technological upheavals. The tools and media used for writing have changed many times: from Sumerian tablets to the Phoenician alphabet of the first millennium BC; from the invention of paper in China about 1,000 years later to the first codex, with its handwritten sheets bound together to make a book; from the invention of printing in the 15th century to the appearance of ballpoint pens in the 1940s.

So at first sight the battle between keyboards and pens might seem to be no more than the latest twist in a very long story, yet another new tool that we will end up getting used to. What really matters is not how we produce a text but its quality, we are often told. When we are reading, few of us wonder whether a text was written by hand or word-processed.

But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter.”

Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. “It’s a big change,” says Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. “Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”

Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. “Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool,” says Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. “Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”

An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Bustarret adds. “The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”

keyboard typing

But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote some years ago. “This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.”

Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. “Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition,” Gentaz explains.

Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, have carried out a study of 76 children, aged three to five. The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. They repeated the experiment on adults, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters. The results were much the same as with the children.

Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory”, Gentaz adds. “Some people have difficulty reading again after a stroke. To help them remember the alphabet again, we ask them to trace the letters with their finger. Often it works, the gesture restoring the memory.”

Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works? Some studies suggest this may indeed be the case. In a paper published in April in the journal Psychological Science , two US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject.

The study focused on more than 300 students at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. It suggested that students who took longhand notes were better able to answer questions on the lecture than those using a laptop. For the scientists, the reason is clear: those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a preliminary process of summarising and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to take a lot of notes, sometimes even making a literal transcript, but avoided what is known as “desirable difficulty”.

On the basic issue of handwriting France has chosen to take the opposite course from the US. In the early 2000s the ministry of education instructed schools to start teaching cursive writing when pupils entered primary school [aged six]. “For a long time we attached little importance to handwriting, which was seen as a fairly routine exercise,” says school inspector Viviane Bouysse. “But in 2000, drawing on work in the neurosciences, we realised that this learning process was a key step in cognitive development.”

“With joined-up writing children learn words as blocks of letters, which helps with spelling,” Bouysse explains. “It’s important in a country where spelling is so complex! However, the ornamental capitals in the patterns published in the 2013 exercise books have been simplified, with fewer loops and scrolls […] They are important, though, because they distinguish proper names or the start of a sentence.”

Some handwriting advocates regret the disappearance of these ornamental effects. “It’s not just a question of writing a letter: it also involves drawing, acquiring a sense of harmony and balance, with rounded forms,” Jouvent asserts. “There is an element of dancing when we write, a melody in the message, which adds emotion to the text. After all that’s why emoticons were invented, to restore a little emotion to text messages.”

Writing has always been seen as expressing our personality. In his books the historian Philippe Artières explained how doctors and detectives, in the late 19th and early 20th century, found signs of deviance among lunatics and delinquents, simply by examining the way they formed their letters. “With handwriting we come closer to the intimacy of the author,” Jouvent explains. “That’s why we are more powerfully moved by the manuscript of a poem by Verlaine than by the same work simply printed in a book. Each person’s hand is different: the gesture is charged with emotion, lending it a special charm.”

Which no doubt explains the narcissistic relationship we often entertain with our own scrawl.

Despite omnipresent IT, Gentaz believes handwriting will persist. “Touchscreens and styluses are taking us back to handwriting. Our love affair with keyboards may not last,” he says.

“It still plays an important part in everyday life,” Bustarret adds. “We write by hand more often than we think, if only to fill in forms or make a label for a jam jar. Writing is still very much alive in our surroundings – in advertising, signing, graffiti and street demonstrations.” Certainly the graphic arts and calligraphy are thriving.

Perhaps, in their way, they compensate for our soulless keyboards.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

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Laura Deutsch

Is It Better to Write By Hand or Computer?

Studies show writing by hand may help your brain..

Posted  October 2, 2017 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

 Morguefile, used with permission

Usually, I write drafts on a computer because I type faster than I write, and because I can name the document, file it on my computer, and find it afterward.

But in class, when I give a freewrite prompt and ask people to write for 10 minutes, I write by hand, and I see differences between writing on the computer and writing by hand. For one thing, there’s the heart/hand connection. When I do a freewrite by hand, I may end up writing a piece that wouldn’t have come out after I stared at the computer screen for hours. However, if I like the piece and want to type it up, name it and file it, it can be a tedious process.

Many studies suggest that there are brain-friendly benefits of writing out letters, notes, essays, or journal entries by hand that you can’t get from typing.

Writing by hand connects you with the words and allows your brain to focus on them, understand them and learn from them. Other studies suggest that writing longhand is a workout for your brain. According to a Wall Street Journal article, some physicians claim that the act of writing—which engages your motor skills, memory , and more—is a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers who want to keep their minds sharp as they age. (See website, Mental Floss. ) Writing by hand helps people remember information and thus retain their memories as they age.

Writing by hand activates more parts of the brain than typing, says the website “Little Things.” It requires writers to use more motor skills and a collection of links around the brain called the “reading circuit.”

Writing by hand can be rhythmic, therapeutic, and calming. It can also jumpstart creativity . Like walking and swimming, writing by hand is usually a surefire way for me to sort things out and it inspires creativity.

I will continue to write on the computer and by hand, but I am aware that writing by hand makes me feel better in some ways than writing on the computer.

Writing prompt: Write about an activity that calms you. Write for seven minutes by hand.

Laura Deutsch

Laura Deutsch is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times , San Francisco Chronicle , and More magazine, among others.

writing notes by hand vs typing

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writing notes by hand vs typing

Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

James Doubek

writing notes by hand vs typing

Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13, 2014, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images hide caption

Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13, 2014, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

"When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

Mueller and Oppenheimer cited that note-taking can be categorized two ways: generative and nongenerative. Generative note-taking pertains to "summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping," while nongenerative note-taking involves copying something verbatim.

And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.

Because people can type faster than they write, using a laptop will make people more likely to try to transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand, Mueller and Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing longhand, you process the information better but have less to look back at.

Don't Write Off Paper Just Yet

Don't Write Off Paper Just Yet

In A Digital Chapter, Paper Notebooks Are As Relevant As Ever

In A Digital Chapter, Paper Notebooks Are As Relevant As Ever

For their first study, they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."

The same thing happened in the second study, even when they specifically told students using laptops to try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that instinct," Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.

And to test the external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.

But the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

Do studies like these mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?

"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."

Pros and Cons of Typed, Digitally Handwritten, and Paper Notes | GUTS Tip

An important process in studying and learning is note-taking. Almost every student does it, and it is a practical requirement to pass a class. With the large amounts of information presented in each course, note-taking helps in encoding the information and thus makes it easier to remember. It also produces study materials to refer to later for exams and projects. Since technology is much more advanced now than it was even 10 years ago, when taking notes on paper was the most popular method, there are options such as typing notes on a computer, and even writing them on tablets (like paper, but digital ). What are the differences between these modalities—typed (computer), digitally handwritten (tablet), or paper?

Typed (Computer)

Typing is a fast and easy way to take the information presented in lectures and textbooks and consolidate them for reference later. But, due to its fast nature, this method leads to the least amount of information retained and will require you to study more later.

Organization is customizable. Limitless folders can be created almost instantly so sorting is as easy as ever. Tags can be applied to files for easy access, sorting, and searching. Each file has a name so it is clear what that file is; and those names can always be changed. Files can easily be moved to different areas on the computer. Since the files are digital, there is no physical footprint and the more files or folders you create does not take up more physical space (unlike more notebooks or papers). All these reasons make the computer the device with the best organization options that are fast and easy.

Easy to share. Rather than copying or scanning notes, computers have simple share screens to instantly share with anyone. People can collaborate on the same document like in Google Docs, or files can be emailed and/or texted quickly. When sharing notes, instead of handing-off the page like you would with paper, you still retain the original notes.

Typing is fastest. Writing can be time-consuming, especially in a fast lecture. Typing takes the least amount of time so more information can be put on the page and reviewed later.

Import lecture slides. If someone does not want to type out all the information a professor teaches, importing lecture slides is very easy and can be stored on the device.

Backups. Although it is less likely anything bad will happen to a computer since it is more valuable than a notebook, computers can backup manually (or automatically) so that your notes are safe. Losing notes can be costly when an exam is approaching and/or you spent a lot of time working on them, by having the ability to backup the notes it is one less thing to worry about.

Some editing capabilities. Although you can change the color and highlight text, or add elements such as photos and tables, text is restricted to being within headers and organized in paragraphs. Although  text boxes are sometimes an option, they do not provide as much placement customization as simply writing the words.

Can be expensive. Computers can range from $150 to thousands. So, unless you are willing to spend the money on that, notebooks are the cheaper alternative costing only a few dollars. Although, it is likely you already have a computer since you are accessing this post and most universities require you to access the internet for assignments, enrolling in classes, etc.

Low retention. Typing has been shown to yield the least retention of the three methods described here. Since it is a faster method and students tend to passively listen and type everything they hear, they do not have to go through the process of picking out the important content for transcription like they would with handwriting since it is slower.

Has battery life. Computers run out of power and die. For it to be reliable, you must remember to charge it regularly, or you may go to class with a computer that dies 5 minutes in.

Digitally Handwritten (Tablet)

The tablet (and other devices that allow digital handwriting) is a happy medium that has both benefits of the computer and those of paper notes. Sharing and customization is easy and handwriting yields greater retention while size makes tablets as portable as notebooks. Some note-taking apps for tablets such as the iPad include GoodNotes and Notability .

Portable. Not only is a tablet the size of a notebook (or smaller), but it also takes the place of  all of them. All your subjects can be stored on the single device (ex. five courses may be  five notebooks but can instead be all on  one device ).

Simple and extensive editing capabilities. Handwriting allows you to write anywhere on a sheet and not be restricted by margins or spacing and there are a variety of pen sizes and colors to use. Photos and other elements can be placed anywhere on a page and text wrapping is not a concern. If you want your handwriting to be turned into text, many apps offer that ability.

Organization is customizable. Tablets, and other such devices, offer the same organization options (and sometimes more) as computers (described above) .

Easy to share. Sharing is just as easy as with computers  (described above) .

High retention. Since you are handwriting the notes on the device, there is higher retention and mental processing of the information. This yield to better acquisition of the information and less need for studying later.

Import lecture slides.  Storing lecture slides is just as easy and the same as with computers  (described above) .

Backups. All your notes can be stored on the device or in the cloud. Same as computers  (described above) .

Writing on glass. Glass is a frictionless surface that is very different from paper, so writing on a tablet may be strange and uncomfortable at first. With time you would probably become more accustomed, and there are always solutions such as the Paperlike iPad screen protector that changes the surface of the glass so it is more like paper.

Expensive.  Tablets cost a lot of money and there are additional costs such as buying the electronic pencil or stylus, a screen protector, and/or a case. These devices are big investments, and while the payoff is great it may be more than some are willing to pay.

Writing can be time consuming. Writing takes longer and requires you to abbreviate words or come back to later to complete. This may be a drawback for you if you do not have much time.

Have battery life. Like the computer, tablets run out of power and die. You must be vigilant about battery power and charge frequently, so it does not die when you need it most.

Paper Notes

The standard modality that college students have used for centuries. Paper notes are the most accessible way to take notes. Cheaper than the other two methods, many people utilize paper notes to record information for courses.

Natural feel. Paper is what we all write on. Many aspects of our lives include writing by hand on paper.

Portable. Notebooks are easy to carry and transport. Just so long as there are not too many .

Flexible. There are no restrictions. A page is very flexible in that you can write anywhere on it.

Cheap. Unlike the other options, notebooks can cost only a few dollars or less and pencils/pens are very cheap as well. This is a great option if you do not want to  break the bank .

Highest retention.  Since you must be very aware of what content you are writing down as well as that erasing is not as easy on say a tablet, there is a higher retention of the materials compared to the other modalities discussed.

No distractions. Computers and tablets have notifications and if someone texts you or you get emails on the device, or your favorite game sends an enticing notification to try and get you to play again can cause distractions. This disrupts your  flow of learning and breaks your focus. Do Not Disturb is an option, but for a truly distraction free experience, paper is the best option.

Easiest to lose and destroy. Notebooks are easy to destroy by tearing a page or erasing too much, water damage,  your dog ate it , etc. They can also be easy to lose and notebooks are often misplaced.

No backups. Unless you scan it or copy the notes, there are no backups, and you have one copy that if destroyed is gone forever. Also, scanning and copying notes takes more of your valuable time that you could use to study the material. This is the riskiest option overall in terms of note safety.

Difficult to correct mistakes and customize. Erasing can be somewhat challenging if you have a lot to erase as some of the writing can remain on the page (just faded) or you might rip the whole page with the force of the eraser. Also, to use many colors or highlight, you must buy additional pens and highlighters. These items are almost never erasable when put on a page as well.   These reasons make customization and corrections very difficult.

Archiving can be difficult. Instead of all your notes stored in one device, it is likely if they are paper that your notes are in several notebooks. Notebooks can accumulate greatly over time resulting in a bunch of old notes that you are not sure if will use again and takes up a lot of space. Also, since they are not digital, specific notes about a specific concept can be very challenging to find since notes are not named, tagged, or able to be searched.

Writing can be time consuming. Writing takes longer than typing. ( This is described above.)

While all three modalities and methods have their own benefits and drawbacks, it is up to you to decide what you value and prioritize to determine which is best for you. Are you okay with spending a bit more money for a tablet or laptop to take notes? Do you like the feel of natural paper? Do you value the speediness typing offers?

For me, I take notes on my iPad with an Apple Pencil and a Paperlike screen protector. The app I use is GoodNotes . I enjoy the customization, organization, and backup options provided with it being digital. But I also value the benefits writing offers and increased retention as a result of it.

Written by Cole Navin

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*This is an opinion post. While the topics described here are mostly based on research, please keep in mind not to assume all of the information described above is factual.

Some sources used: https://theproductiveengineer.net/taking-notes-ipad-vs-paper/ , https://studybreaks.com/college/digital-notes-versus-paper/.

Get personalized tips on how to improve your notetaking by meeting with one of our Study Skills Coordinators! Sign-up for a 1:1 appointment at guts.wisc.edu/study/ss .

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Swapna Krishna

Swapna Krishna

Nov 1st 2021, in handwriting vs. typing notes, pen and paper might win out.

Twitter

As modern technology becomes more ubiquitous and less expensive, we’re integrating it into every aspect of our daily lives. This is certainly the case in classrooms, with teachers depending more and more on technology to deliver lessons and keep track of students’ progress. Students, in turn, are more reliant on tablets and laptops for their learning, especially during the pandemic when students were receiving instruction virtually and asynchronously.

But there are questions around this kind of technology-based learning — specifically, does it impact students’ ability to learn and retain knowledge? Is there a difference in learning and retention when students use handwriting vs. typing notes? The influx of technology in the classroom has presented questions on how the human brain learns.

The Role of Tech in Teaching

It’s hard to dispute that technology affects learning in myriad ways. While technology eased some of the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, it also highlighted inequality. Many outlets, including TechCrunch , reported inequitable access to the equipment, devices and broadband internet that allowed students to take advantage of remote learning. Clearly, not having access to the technology needed to receive instruction would have a drastic impact on learning.

But if students did have access to the technology they needed, or this technology was included within the classroom experience, then is there still a difference between learning through different mediums? How does handwriting vs. typing notes impact education outcomes? In a recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology , a research team led by Eva Ose Askvik at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology took a close look at optimal learning within a classroom setting, and specifically at the effectiveness of handwriting vs. typing notes.

Handwriting vs. Typing Notes: Which Wins?

This isn’t the first study to examine the effectiveness of handwriting vs. typing notes. Previous studies have made clear how the human brains learns — drawing letters and taking notes longhand is more effective than typing them out, according to an earlier Frontiers in Psychology report. But the study by Askvik’s group looks at whether taking notes using a pen uses more of the brain than typing notes out, specifically in 12-year-old children. The implication is that if more of the brain is used, learning is more effective.

According to Science News for Students , taking notes longhand is more involved because it involves thinking about and producing the shape of each individual letter, retrieving memories of what the letters look like, controlling our hands when writing and watching the shape of each letter take form. When you type things out, you’re simply hitting keys on a keyboard. Your brain isn’t forced to engage in the same way.

Researchers asked 12 adults and 12 seventh-graders to use cursive handwriting to take notes with a digital pen, and then to type the same notes out with a keyboard. The team recorded participants’ brain waves, taking note of which areas of the brain were activated at any given time.

The results of the study were clear: For the most effective learning and remembering, it was better for students to write or draw by hand versus typing out notes. The researchers deduced this because writing and drawing activated areas of the brain that typing didn’t. And it’s important to note that both adult and kid brains delivered similar results.

Digital Without the Downsides

That’s not to say that the study’s authors advocate for banning tech tools in the classroom — after all, the study was performed with digital handwriting. Rather, they make clear that teachers and instructors shouldn’t preference one method over all others.

Some schools are replacing handwriting with typing , and the study’s authors don’t recommend that kind of singular approach.

“It is important to ensure that handwriting practice remains a central activity in early letter learning, regardless if this occurs with a stylus and tablet or traditional paper and pencil,” the researchers note in the paper.

Technology isn’t in and of itself a bad thing — but using a mix of methods might be the best match for how the human brain learns. The study’s authors suggest varying the ways students take notes — incorporating handwriting, drawing and typing — to ensure that learners remain stimulated and engaged, committing material to memory as much as possible.

Are you interested in science and innovation? We are, too. Check out Northrop Grumman career opportunities to see how you can participate in this fascinating time of discovery.

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New study suggests handwriting engages the brain more than typing

Alexandra Mae Jones

Alexandra Mae Jones CTVNews.ca writer

@AlexandraMaeJ Contact

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Typing, clicking and watching occupy an increasing number of hours in the average child's day. But brain research shows that writing by hand helps people remember better and learn more. The photo shows a EEG Geodesic Sensor Net with 256 evenly distributed sensors that was used to record EEG activity from the participant's scalp during the research. (NTNU/Microsoft)

TORONTO -- A new study out of Norway suggests that handwriting and drawing engages the brain far more than typing on a keyboard, after measuring the brain activity of children and young adults performing these tasks.

The research, published this past summer in the journal Frontiers in Psychology , looked at a small sample size of twelve children and twelve young adults. The authors had studied the topic before in 2017 by looking at the brain activity of 20 students, but this new study is the first to include children.

Audrey van der Meer, a neuroscientist and professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), said in an October press release that due to an increased reliance on the digital sphere, “we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand.

“Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence" of increased digital activity, she added.

The 12 children were all in Grade 7 at a school in Trondheim, where they were used to cursive writing and drawing. The young adults who participated in the study were recruited from the NTNU campus, with the average age of roughly 24.

Each person was studied individually for around 45 minutes.

To measure participant’s brain activity, researchers used an EEG Geodesic Sensor Net. Although at a glance, it looks like a pebbly hood pulled over the head, it is actually 256 metal sensors, or electrodes, which are placed across the skull to record changes in electrical activity within the brain as it is stimulated by tasks.

While participants were hooked up to the electrodes, they performed the tasks of handwriting, typewriting and drawing.

“Fifteen different words, varying in task difficulty, were visually presented on a screen and the participants used a digital pen to write and draw directly on the touch screen, and a keyboard to type the presented words,” the report described.

After analyzing the brain activity taken from the experiment, researchers found that areas of the brain correlated with working memory and encoding new information were more active during handwriting.

This echoes previous studies, such as one often-cited 2014 study called “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard,” which have shown that writing notes by hand allowed participants to retain information better than those who typed on a laptop, even if they wrote less words overall.

“The neural processes involved in handwriting and drawing seem to be more similar to each other compared to typewriting,” the report from this new study noted.

The physical act of forming handwritten letters aided with the activation of more complex neural connections, according to researchers, but although typing requires physical movement, it didn’t spur the same on-task level of brain activity in this experiment.

“The present findings suggest that the delicate and precisely controlled movements involved in handwriting contribute to the brain’s activation patterns related to learning,” the report said. “We found no evidence of such activation patterns when using a keyboard.”

Researchers noted that the differences between brain activity while handwriting and typewriting were more pronounced for the adults than for the children, but said the findings still “provide support for handwriting practice providing beneficial neuronal activation patterns for learning.”

As digital learning becomes more ubiquitous in our world, particularly during a pandemic that has made remote-learning a reality for thousands, this study suggests that educators should take care to still include hand writing as part of the learning process.

"Learning to write by hand is a bit slower process, but it's important for children to go through the tiring phase of learning to write by hand,” said Van der Meer in the release. “If you use a keyboard, you use the same movement for each letter. Writing by hand requires control of your fine motor skills and senses. It's important to put the brain in a learning state as often as possible.”

This doesn’t mean researchers believe keyboards and laptops have no place in writing or education.

“I would use a keyboard to write an essay, but I'd take notes by hand during a lecture,” Van der Meer explained.

Part of her concern is that in her country-- Norway -- many schools no longer teach handwriting, according to the release. In Canada, cursive writing has also been de-emphasized over the past decade, with some provinces removing it from their curriculums, and others simply making it optional.

“If we don't challenge our brain, it can't reach its full potential. And that can impact school performance," says Van der Meer.

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The Ballpoint Pens

The Benefits Of Writing By Hand vs. Typing

For thousands of years, people rely solely on traditional writing tools such as pencils and ballpoint pens .

Most people, including professional writers and students, now are relying on computers. They input their ideas directly on the laptop or even smartphones.

The Benefits of Writing by Hand vs. Typing

One of the benefits of handwriting is that it is easier to spot an error on the draft. After you set aside your document, errors would surface making them noticeable to your eyes.

Writing by hand gives you a better understanding of the concept or idea you’re writing.

For instance, a study conducted by Daniel Oppenheimer and Paul Mueller suggests that students who jot down notes using paper and pen had a better understanding of the subject matter than those who use a computer.

Handwriting also gives you freedom over the entire page. You can freely write your important ideas on any part of the paper without worrying about the margins.

Most people, including me, achieve more creativity when writing by hand vs. typing. My mind seems to work smoothly while writing using a pen than striking a keyboard of a computer.

Writing by hand also allows a writer to make initial corrections while transforming the manuscript from handwritten to an electronic copy. Therefore, the first editing happens during the transcription process.

The Benefits of Typing vs. Handwriting

Hitting a keyboard is far easier than striking a pen on a paper. The latter process would take years especially for children to master. In addition, a computerized copy of a transcript is easier to read than those written by hand.

Lastly, if you typed your documents on a computer, you can find many tools online to help you edit your work. Spotting the errors in your document is even easier than before. This is not possible in traditional paper and pencil writing.

However, scientific studies had drawn the significant differences between writing by hand vs. typing.

The Benefits of Writing Longhand

The number of people who use the computer in writing is increasing. One study (a British survey) found that many people don’t use traditional writing strategies anymore.

However, a body of research over the years found fascinating findings. The previous studies had shown the benefits of traditional writing strategy on human cognition. Here are some of the most forgotten benefits of longhand writing.

1. Longhand writing allows you to think faster

If you are deciding which is better between the two (writing by hand vs. writing), you probably need an enticing piece of evidence. Here’s one of the proofs. The New York Times report shows that handwriting helps children gain better educational development.

“Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.”

2. Longhand writing boosts memory

The notion that traditional writing has more benefits over typing has proven by several studies. One of the most well-known research was done by Mueller and Oppenheimer.

During the course of their study, the researchers tested student participants’ memory recall and conceptual understanding.

The conclusion was:

“Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.”

3. Longhand writing improves creativity

4. longhand writing minimizes distraction.

Longhand writing allows you to focus on the idea you want to write. Writing on a paper minimizes distraction. The reason why most students have difficulties in finishing their research paper is that of the accessible social media. It is easy to get distracted when you are connected to the internet.

Longhand writing can also be beneficial in attaining emotional calmness . Dr. Marc Seifer , a graphologist, and author said that “Jotting down a sentence like, ‘I will be more peaceful’ at least 20 times per day can actually have an impact, especially on those with attention deficit disorder.”

Writing by Hand vs. Typing Notes in College

Although science finds interesting finding on writing processes, it still difficult to decide overwriting by hand vs. typing. Everyone is different and all of us deal with things differently.

Scientific findings to have contrasting suggestions. Some researchers found that writing longhand is more beneficial than typing. While others suggest the opposite.

The majority of studies recommend manual writing over typing. As found in those studies, writing on a paper (jotting down notes during a class discussion) is effective in storing the information.

Writing down notes manually initiates cognitive functioning making the brain active. Activation in brain cortices creates a better neural connection that will hold the newly learned information. The stronger the neural connection, the better the storage of the information. This means that you will easily remember what you have studied.

This is because, the brain would unconsciously believe that once an idea is written, it is safe to forget and easy to go back later.

Although the previous study did not directly examine this assumption, it is the most viable explanation the researchers could provide.

So which do you prefer? Of course, the answer to this question relies solely on your personal preference. Some people are more effective and creative when using pen and paper. While others aren’t. Any comparison or imposition of one’s own way of writing may be inappropriate.

Although scientific findings propose a seemingly valid argument, your decision should jive with your personal attributes when it comes to writing. If you think you’re more effective with longhand writing, go for it. Otherwise, use a computer or typing.

Our personal preference though is longhand writing. We write faster and more efficient when using the traditional pen and paper. But of course, it is our personal choice. Decide which is better for you; writing by hand vs. typing.

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National Pen

The Benefits of Handwriting vs. Typing [Infographic]

Handwriting vs Typing - Featured Image

With our smartphones and laptops, we’re typing on keyboards more frequently than writing by hand. Typing has become our go-to method of writing for everything, from work emails to personal to-do lists. While typing may be faster and more convenient, research shows handwriting has its own unique advantages.

So, if you’re an avid typist, do yourself a favor and take a look at these key benefits of handwriting vs. typing. Pick up a pad of paper and pen to take some handwritten notes!

Effective Memory Recall

Though a little more time consuming, there are many benefits of handwriting your notes. Longhand notes allow for better short- and long-term memory recall because they contain your own words and handwriting. These can serve as effective memory cues by recreating the context and content from the original lecture or meeting.

When you write things out, you create spatial relations between each bit of information you’re recording. Handwriting activates parts of your brain involved in thinking and working memory, and allows you to store and manage information. The movement associated with the pen and your hand can help you encode and retain information long-term.

Sharpened Critical Thinking

Comparing handwriting vs. typing, you’re more exposed to critical thinking when you write by hand than when you type. Handwriting allows you to think more thoroughly about the information you’re recording. It encourages you to expand upon your thoughts and form connections between them. This can be further enhanced by using pens of different colored ink as a color-coding system to organize thoughts and form more connections.

Strong writers can identify relationships between abstract ideas and also develop unconventional solutions to complex problems. If you do not write regularly, it may be more difficult to extract meaning from text and interpret the context of words and phrases.

Stronger Conceptual Understanding

When you write your notes by hand, you develop a stronger conceptual understanding than by typing. Since handwriting is slower and more tedious, it makes it harder to take notes verbatim. Therefore you have to actually process the information and summarize it in a way that makes sense for you.

This illustrates one of the other benefits of handwriting vs. typing. Handwriting forces your brain to mentally engage with the information, improving both literacy and reading comprehension. On the other hand, typing encourages verbatim notes without giving much thought to the information. This mindless transcription can lead to a lack of meaningful understanding and application of the information, although you may be able to type more words quickly.

Finding Your Pen Types for Handwriting

Handwriting is a neurosensory exercise, so it’s important to choose the pen types that fit your writing style and needs. Stylizing your handwritten notes gives you a chance to further analyze and organize thoughts and ideas to make note taking more efficient and personalized.

Best Sellers at National Pen

Five of the most popular pen types include:.

Ballpoint Pens  – the perfect solution for those looking for a no-frills pen that’s both easy and accessible to use. Rollerball Pens  – offer consistent ink flow with a variety of styles and point-sizes. Rollerball pens are great for those who want variation but still expect dependability. Marker Pens  – ideal for people who want a versatile pen for more than just writing. Typically marker pens are available in multiple pen tip sizes. Gel Pens  – designed for the bold and the creative, gel pens provide a smooth writing experience with eye-catching colors and effects. Stylus Pens  – combine tech with traditional writing. Stylus pens are an all-in-one solution for people who like writing by hand, but want the digital convenience associated with typing.

The benefits of handwriting don’t stop at more efficient and effective note taking – handwriting also allows you to take a deeper look at your personality. Now that you know more about handwriting vs. typing, see what your handwriting says about you! View our  What Does Your Handwriting Say About You?  infographic. Also, see our new blog post on the Best Pens of 2019!

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Note-Taking: Writing vs. Typing Notes

It’s time for the note-taking showdown everyone has been waiting for. Today, we reveal the winner of the ultimate note-taking battle… pencil-and-paper vs the computer. This has been the hottest question on note-taking for the past few years, and we have an answer for you!

So, which is better?  

Full Disclosure

Before we dig into the facts, I want to share my education background. I am a full-time member of the SOAR ® team, born in the year 1993. I am a millennial. I started my schooling taking notes on paper. In high school, I started using computers for school-work. By the time I got to college, everyone (myself included) was using the computer for everything, even in the classroom.

I have used all of the options when it comes to note-taking. I am sure after reading this short bio you have a guess of which method/tool I have a bias towards. But, I ask you to keep reading.

My experience — and the data– might surprise you.

The Research

Two professors (one from Princeton and one from UCLA) conducted a study by running three experiments. They had students take notes in a classroom setting. The study looked at students taking notes on a variety of things: bats, bread, algorithms, faith, and economics.  After, the students were tested on:

The study revealed that students who wrote their notes on paper learned more than those who typed their notes 1 .   Students who wrote their notes by hand were aware they wouldn’t catch every word. It forced them to focus on listening and digesting, then summarize in their own written words. The process made the brain work more efficiently; it also fosters comprehension and retention of the material.

The research shows that students who took notes on their laptop did take more notes . But, they retained much less. This is because students who use a laptop simply type a record of the lecture. They don’t use their brain to process what is being taught. Therefore, students are merely transcribing, not processing.

Effective, Yet Modern Approaches

There are two solutions for successful note-taking.  I have personally put them both to the test.

Solution #1: Take notes the classic way, pencil in hand.

Whenever you can, write your notes by hand. Put your brain to the test. Listen, comprehend, and summarize in your notes. Besides the increased opportunity for  higher retention, you won’t have the distractions that come with a computer.

Research shows that college students taking notes on a computer only spend 60% of class taking notes. They spend 40% of class time using the internet or other programs unrelated to the class. Plus, electronic devices introduce the opportunity for social media to interrupt your focus.

Unfortunately, I can personally attest to this statistic. I spent lots of time in class on Pinterest. Or working on other homework. Basically I did anything I could find to do besides taking notes during the lecture. (Sorry, Mom!)

That being said, I am not unreasonable. Being fresh out of college, I know how important it is to use laptops and other technology in school. No one can deny the speed at which you can take notes, compared to writing by hand.  

At some point, you will encounter a class in which you truly can’t keep up with how fast the teacher is teaching. If you try hand-written notes and end up feeling completely overwhelmed or with short phrases that don’t make sense, pull out your laptop and try…

Solution #2: Type, then write!

When hand-written note-taking is overwhelming, you can then take notes on your computer. But, in order to successfully retain the information, you will need to follow three guidelines:

Do you feel like you don’t know what you should be writing in your notes? Or, want to see our fast and simple method for turning notes into test questions? We’ve got you covered…

The SOAR ® note-taking process will decrease the amount of time you spend studying, eliminate “all-nighters”, and increase comprehension!

If you are a parent and want your student to learn these skills at home, click here .

If you are a teacher looking to impact your whole classroom, click here .

Happy note-taking,

Jessie S. SOAR ® Team Member

* This is a step you should take whether you started with hand-written notes or just transferred them.

1  http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/06/05/a-secret-for-learning-dont-take-notes-with-your-laptop/

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The Benefits of Writing by Hand Versus Typing

The debate over hand writing important notes versus typing them is one we’ve hit on before , but this graphic lays out all of the data clearly, and even offers some tips on choosing a writing implement based on the type of notes you’re taking.

Granted, the graphic below comes from National Pen, who has a vested interest in making sure you actually put pen to paper and take physical notes, but the information within is still useful. In addition to pointing out that some of the benefits of typing are that it’s faster and more convenient, but writing improves memory recall and encourages critical thinking. Luckily, there are ways to have your cake and eat it too, like using a stylus to write on a tablet, or scanning your paper notes for easy reference in a service like Evernote.

Either way, check out the graphic below for a little more on the topic, some suggestions for the best ways to take notes (including using multiple colors and mind mapping), and their thoughts on what your choice of pen says about you personally (a far less scientific perspective, I’ll add.)

The Benefits of Handwriting vs. Typing | National Pen

writing notes by hand vs typing

Science is Knowledge

A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material

A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

“More is better.”  From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture.  When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance.  Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes.  Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write , those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand.  Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date.  Only it isn’t.  New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.  Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information.  Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand.  As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes.  In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

What drives this paradoxical finding?  Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.  Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture.  Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.  Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop.  Their studies included hundreds of students from Princeton and UCLA, and the lecture topics ranged from bats, bread, and algorithms to faith, respiration, and economics.  Content analysis of the notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand.  Moreover, high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material.  It appears that students who use laptops can take notes in a fairly mindless, rote fashion, with little analysis or synthesis by the brain.  This kind of shallow transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or application of the information.

If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance.  Mueller and Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed them to think about the information and type notes in their own words.  Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who received no such warning.  It is possible these direct instructions to improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on less demanding, mindless processes when typing.

It’s important to note that most of the studies that have compared note taking by hand versus laptop have used immediate memory tests administered very shortly (typically less than an hour) after the learning session.  In real classroom settings, however, students are often assessed days if not weeks after learning new material.  Thus, although laptop users may not encode as much during the lecture and thus may be disadvantaged on immediate assessments, it seems reasonable to expect that the additional information they record will give them an advantage when reviewing material after a long delay.

Wrong again.  Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be tested on the material in a week.  When participants were given an opportunity to study with their notes before the final assessment, once again those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants.  Because longhand notes contain students’ own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.

These findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before class.  Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words.  Indeed, students may take very minimal notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to engage in the mental work that supports learning.

Beyond altering students’ cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops pose other threats in the classroom.  In the Mueller and Oppenheimer studies, all laptops were disconnected from the internet, thus eliminating any disruption from email, instant messaging, surfing, or other online distractions.  In most typical college settings, however, internet access is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40% of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task , and are less satisfied with their education.  In one study with law school students, nearly 90% of laptop users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five minutes, and roughly 60% were distracted for half the class.

Technology offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students, often in positive and dynamic ways.  The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning.  Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information.  If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities.  When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor  Gareth Cook , a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular  contributor  to NewYorker.com. Gareth is also the series editor of  Best American Infographics , and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail dot com or Twitter  @garethideas .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Cindi May is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston. She explores mechanisms for optimizing cognitive function in college students, older adults, and individuals with intellectual disabilities. She is also the project director for a TPSID grant from the Department of Education, which promotes the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities in postsecondary education.

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Writing vs Typing Notes: What is More Effective?

writing notes by hand vs typing

What is the difference when writing vs typing notes on a laptop or tablet and using a pen and paper? Research indicates that physically writing notes on paper is the clear winner.

Yes, writing by hand is a slower task, but it makes it so that students have to be more selective in what they’re writing. Researchers have found that the actual processes involved in writing by hand mean students have a deeper understanding of the material.

If students are still going to use a laptop or tablet over pen and paper, they’re not doomed. However, students need to override their instinct to write everything and instead be more selective. And, of course, organize their notes immediately afterward and review them regularly.

What the Research Says on Writing vs Typing Notes

The research is clear: the better way to cement knowledge in your brain is to write your study notes by hand rather than type them. A simple change can make things easier to recall on test day.

Hard to believe? 

Research published recently in the journal Frontiers in Psychology , echoes previous studies, such as one often-cited 2014 study called “ The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard ,” which shows that writing notes by hand allowed participants to retain information better than those who typed on a laptop, even if they wrote fewer words overall.

When students take notes by hand, it develops a stronger conceptual understanding than by typing. Since handwriting is slower and more tedious, it makes it harder to take notes verbatim. Therefore students have to actually process the information and summarize it in a way that makes sense for them.

Taking Notes 101

Taking notes in class is important: as much as we’d like to think we will remember what a teacher or instructor said, most of us don’t have a memory that recalls everything. That’s why taking notes in class is so important.

While there isn’t a right or wrong way to take notes, there are methods that can be more effective.

Firstly, students do not need to write down everything. This is a mistake many students make.

If students’ in-class notes are messy, unorganized, and unclear at first glance, they’re not going to get much use out of them. This has nothing to do with how neat their handwriting is—it’s about how their notes are structured. Learn more about the best note-taking methods here.

GradePower Learning Can Help

Taking notes is an important part in the learning process. Taking note properly in class and when studying helps students remember information better and reduces stress at test time. Help your child develop more effective note-taking and study skills with GradePower Learning. Contact a location near you today!

How to Study For Long-Term Memory Skills

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IMAGES

  1. Handwriting Vs Typing Infographic

    writing notes by hand vs typing

  2. Taking Notes in Class: Laptops vs. Handwriting

    writing notes by hand vs typing

  3. Handwriting Vs Typing Infographic

    writing notes by hand vs typing

  4. Handwriting vs. Typing

    writing notes by hand vs typing

  5. Good Handwriting or Easy Typing: Which to Choose

    writing notes by hand vs typing

  6. Writing vs. Typing Notes: The Better Approach to Studying for the Bar

    writing notes by hand vs typing

VIDEO

  1. Basic typewriting classes PART -1

  2. Typewriting exam shorts #typewriting #typing #exam

  3. Basic typewriting classes PART

  4. Ways to Make 🤑🤑 with Typing #typingjobwork

  5. Handwritten Notes vs Typed Notes

  6. steno Shiksha 19 #steno #shorthand #stenography #ytshorts #dictation

COMMENTS

  1. Handwriting vs. Typing: What Are the Benefits of Writing by Hand

    Typing is better for work that requires formatting. If you're working on an assignment with a word count or that requires specific margins and layout, a computer allows you to keep track of these things very easily. Typing is good for research and multi-tasking.

  2. Handwritten vs. Typed Notes: Which Is Really Better?

    Handwriting vs. Typing: Editing the Notes One major benefit of typing and digital note-taking is that you can easily edit your notes after class. Handwritten notes also have some room for corrections, but the more you edit them, the messier and harder to review they usually get.

  3. Handwriting vs typing notes: note-taking methods

    Typed notes Studies show that students tend to transcribe the professor's words when typing notes. This captures more material, but it's less useful for understanding the subject on a conceptual level. Typing notes in this way causes shallower information processing than handwritten notes.

  4. Handwriting vs. Typing: How to Choose the Best Method to Take Notes

    In comparison with writing notes by hand, typing notes allows you to write down more details, though the disadvantage of writing too much is that you might end up drowning in unnecessary details, which could make it more difficult to study from those notes later on.

  5. For More Effective Studying, Take Notes With Pen and Paper

    Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly ...

  6. Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?

    The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. They repeated the experiment on adults, teaching them...

  7. Handwriting vs. typing: Study shows which is best for notes

    Notably, handwriting was also up to a third faster: The paper-and-pen writers averaged 11 minutes to take their notes, while stylus-on-a-tablet users took 14 minutes, and those who typed on the...

  8. Is It Better to Write By Hand or Computer?

    Writing by hand activates more parts of the brain than typing, says the website "Little Things." It requires writers to use more motor skills and a collection of links around the brain called...

  9. Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

    Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way. For one...

  10. Pros and Cons of Typed, Digitally Handwritten, and Paper Notes

    Writing can be time-consuming, especially in a fast lecture. Typing takes the least amount of time so more information can be put on the page and reviewed later. Import lecture slides. If someone does not want to type out all the information a professor teaches, importing lecture slides is very easy and can be stored on the device. Backups.

  11. 3 Charts

    Writing notes does indeed lead to better learning. Winner: Writing Is Writing or Typing Better for Exam Performance The final question, truly the only one that matters for students, is whether you do better on an exam when you type or when you write notes.

  12. In Handwriting vs. Typing Notes, Pen and Paper Might Win Out

    This isn't the first study to examine the effectiveness of handwriting vs. typing notes. Previous studies have made clear how the human brains learns — drawing letters and taking notes longhand is more effective than typing them out, according to an earlier Frontiers in Psychology report.

  13. New study suggests handwriting engages the brain more than typing

    Researchers noted that the differences between brain activity while handwriting and typewriting were more pronounced for the adults than for the children, but said the findings still "provide...

  14. The Benefits Of Writing By Hand vs. Typing

    Writing by Hand vs. Typing Notes in College. Although science finds interesting finding on writing processes, it still difficult to decide overwriting by hand vs. typing. Everyone is different and all of us deal with things differently. Scientific findings to have contrasting suggestions. Some researchers found that writing longhand is more ...

  15. The Benefits of Handwriting vs. Typing [Infographic]

    This illustrates one of the other benefits of handwriting vs. typing. Handwriting forces your brain to mentally engage with the information, improving both literacy and reading comprehension. On the other hand, typing encourages verbatim notes without giving much thought to the information. This mindless transcription can lead to a lack of ...

  16. Note-Taking: Writing vs. Typing Notes

    Solution #1: Take notes the classic way, pencil in hand. Whenever you can, write your notes by hand. Put your brain to the test. Listen, comprehend, and summarize in your notes. Besides the increased opportunity for higher retention, you won't have the distractions that come with a computer. Research shows that college students taking notes ...

  17. Which is Better? Handwriting VS Typing Notes (the Science of Note

    Handwriting VS Typing Notes (the Science of Note Taking)In this video, we compare handwritten notes vs typed notes and see which one is better for learning a...

  18. The Benefits of Writing by Hand Versus Typing

    The debate over hand writing important notes versus typing them is one we've hit on before, but this graphic lays out all of the data clearly, and even offers some tips on choosing a...

  19. A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

    Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for...

  20. Writing vs Typing Notes: What is More Effective?

    And, of course, organize their notes immediately afterward and review them regularly. What the Research Says on Writing vs Typing Notes. The research is clear: the better way to cement knowledge in your brain is to write your study notes by hand rather than type them. A simple change can make things easier to recall on test day.