Notebook
Handwriting or typing: what helps you learn.
The famous study says the pen beats the laptop. The full story is a little different, and more useful for how you study.
- In a well-known study, students on laptops took more word-for-word notes and did worse on conceptual questions.
- Later replications found the handwriting advantage much smaller, and how you take notes matters most.
- Put things in your own words instead of copying, then quiz yourself later, whether you use a pen or a keyboard.
Pen or laptop: the question comes up every semester. Usually someone cites a study showing that handwriting wins hands down. Here's what that study actually found, what came after it, and how to get the best of both.
What the famous study found
Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer had students watch talks and take notes, some by hand and some on a laptop. Afterward, everyone answered questions about the content. Their 2014 paper is called The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard, and the title sums up the result.
Laptop note-takers wrote down more words and copied whole sentences verbatim more often. On factual questions, both groups did about the same, but on conceptual questions the laptop group did worse. The authors' explanation: when you write by hand, you can't keep up, so you have to choose what matters and condense it as you go.
Why the advantage is smaller than you've heard
Good research gets repeated. Kevin Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson reran the experiments in 2019, and Heather Urry and colleagues did it again in 2021 with more participants. Once again, laptop users took more notes and more of them verbatim. But neither team found a clear advantage for handwriting on understanding.
What's left is one finding every study shares: copying word for word doesn't do much. It just happens more easily on a laptop, because your fingers can keep up with the speaker.
What actually matters
Taking notes helps when you think while you do it. Copying verbatim feels thorough, but it barely processes the material. When you choose, organize and rephrase in your own words, you're already learning as you write.
Mitochondria are the organelles in which cellular respiration takes place and ATP is produced.A sentence lifted straight off the slide. You didn't have to understand anything to write it.
Mitochondria: where cellular respiration happens, supply the cell with ATPShort, in your words, and easy to turn into a question later.
Handwriting makes this easier because it forces you to cut. You can do it on a keyboard too, you just have to do it on purpose. Either way, the real studying starts after class, when you cover your notes and quiz yourself.
How to take good notes by hand
When you write by hand, you won't catch every sentence, and that's the point. A few habits help you catch what matters anyway:
- Use shorthand: arrows for causes and effects, a star for exam material, abbreviations for terms that keep coming up.
- Leave room: keep a column or margin free for questions you add after class.
- Write down examples: an example from the lecture often sticks better than the definition that goes with it.
- Mark the gaps: put a question mark where you lost track, and look it up later.
The same day, read the page once more and fill in what's missing. It only takes a few minutes and turns a page of keywords into notes you can actually study from.
When typing is the better choice
The keyboard has real advantages, and sometimes it's simply the better tool. For example:
- You need a lot of text, such as quotes for a paper.
- You want to search your notes later or share them with others.
- Writing by hand is very slow for you or painful.
- The material is mostly code or long definitions that have to be exact.
Just don't use the keyboard as a dictation machine. Write bullet points instead of full sentences, and after class add a few questions you'll ask yourself later.
The best of both worlds
With a stylus and a tablet, you get the benefits of handwriting plus much of what only a keyboard can do. You write by hand but can still move, erase and reorder pages. Drop your slides into the notebook as a PDF and write right on them.
If you like, Hazelnote underlines misspelled words in your handwriting and suggests the right spelling. And if you want to set up a page so it's easy to study from later, our article on the Cornell method shows how.
Your checklist for the next lecture
- Decide on pen or keyboard, and stick with it
- Write bullet points in your own words, not full sentences
- After class, write down three questions about the material
- The next day, cover your notes and quiz yourself
Common questions
The bottom line
Handwriting isn't magic, but it pushes you to condense, and that's what helps you learn. Pen or keyboard, take notes in your own words and quiz yourself afterward. That covers the most important lesson from all the research.
