Is the pen mightier than the laptop?
Can we take a moment of silence for everyone struggling to capture thoughts and ideas? Let’s use this moment to think of a practical example: The average student.
A student myself, I know that we attend plenty of classes throughout the day. Each of a different subject. We are receiving almost an overdose of information on a daily basis. We attempt to capture this information through notes so that we remember as much as possible. But the teachers talking fast and your hands can’t cope.
Notetaking is essential for student life. Notes during a class. Notes during an online lecture. Notes during self-study. Notes while ideating for a research paper or essay. So let’s try and make this process as effective as it gets.
Laptops are the ultimate writing tool. Portable, powerful and convenient. Open a blank document and start typing. Multitasking is a possibility on the laptop. Watch a lecture online and make notes. Listen to music while writing a paper. But is the laptop better than paper?
There is much discussion on this topic. It all comes down to preferences and the reason why you are taking notes. A laptop has several benefits. Typing is faster than writing by hand. The average typist types 41 words a minute. People doing it on a daily basis can go much faster than that.
Speed is essential because when listening to a lecture you want to get all the information you can. Gaps lead to misunderstandings. The laptop is the clear winner when it comes to consuming content. But, is this all that important. When taking notes on a laptop students tend to take down things verbatim. Writing forces you to summarise the content in your own words. More comprehensive cognitive processing takes place here in comparison to transcribing.
Various studies support this claim. One of them is Pam Meuller’s and Daniel Oppenheimer’s. They claim that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. They conducted three experiments across a classroom setting. The students took notes in a class. Later, the students wrote a test. It evaluated memory, factual detail, conceptual understanding, synthesis and generalization skills.
While taking notes, half took them with a laptop, and the other half wrote by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. But, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding. They were also were more successful in applying and integrating the material.
Handwriting notes and typing them need different types of cognitive processing. This is how Mueller and Oppenheimer justify the result. Writing is more cumbersome than typing, students aren’t able to write everything down. So students listen, digest, and summarize. They can now succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,”. These efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, typing students produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning. Typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word. This speed means that students type without devoting much thought to the content.
I was facing this confusion while preparing for my assessments. This confusion was what provoked me to write this blog. Neither online notes nor handwritten notes are unhelpful or wasteful. They serve different purposes. I tried out both of these methods for two weeks each. Handwriting all my notes was tough and tedious. When I switched to taking my notes online, I wasn’t able to do or remember enough. I am now handwriting my notes for some subjects and taking notes online for the others. However, some of my friends prefer to type out all of their notes and find it just as helpful. I understand that both are useful but should be utilised at different times.
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 the expectation is of conceptual understanding. When the nitty-gritty details are critical to remember. When the material you need to write down isn’t convenient to type up on a computer.
Typing your notes work best if there is a lot of material that you need to write down. When 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. You will have to rely more on going over the material after you finish taking the notes. This isn’t a bad thing. You just need to work your techniques around this.
Using both methods works well for me and is definitely more enjoyable. Yet, I would recommend you to try out both methods for a certain time-span and find your best fit.
Thank you for reading!
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