A substantial body of research suggests that students tend to remember and understand information more effectively when they take notes by hand rather than typing them. The most widely cited study is by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), who conducted three controlled experiments comparing longhand and laptop note-taking.
Mueller and Oppenheimer found that although laptop users wrote more words, students who wrote their notes by hand performed significantly better on exams and were more successful at applying and integrating knowledge. The authors concluded that typing encourages verbatim transcription – copying text without really thinking about what it means – which leads to shallower processing. They determined that handwriting your notes promotes deeper cognitive engagement with the material you’re trying to learn.
In other words, writing notes by hand helps you remember material better, at a deeper level, and for a longer time.
Handwriting your notes forces you to summarize and paraphrase information. These are higher-level thinking skills, and they help you translate information you see or read into words that make sense to you. When you write by hand, your mind slows down and you actively process ideas, which strengthens your understanding and the way you form memories. In contrast, typing allows you to capture information quickly, but you do it with little or no reflection.
Neuroscience supports this idea. It shows that handwriting activates the motor, visual, and language regions in your brain. That means you make more connections across more parts of your brain. This leads to deeper long-term memory storage compared to typing, and that improves your ability to retain information for things like examinations.
The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the higher you score. See? Writing is good for you!
References
Focke, Caroline. “Handwriting vs.Typing Notes on Memory Retrieval.” Talking Teaching, AD Instruments, May 2024, www.adinstruments.com/blog/talking-teaching-how-do-handwriting-and-typing-influence-learning.
Marano, Giuseppe, et al. “The Neuroscience behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing-Who Wins the Battle?” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 22 Feb. 2025, www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/3/345.
Mueller, Pam A, and Daniel M Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.” Sage Journals, 23 Apr. 2014, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614524581.
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