this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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I disagree that writing by hand is magically improving information absorbtion/retention. Source: I've been doing it through all of my school and all of my uni. Being half-asleep, pondering something completely irrelevant, and in general course material flying completely over my head while I write it down was a norm most of the time. And lecturers dictating their stuff at high speeds didn't help either. Maybe there is some temporary novelty effect after you switch from one way of writing to another, but I wouldn't expect that last long.
No one that has looked at this in a serious way agrees with you.
From the abstract:
“These results suggest that the movements involved in handwriting allow a greater memorization of new words. The advantage of handwriting over typing might also be caused by a more positive mood during learning. Finally, our results show that handwriting with a digital pen and tablet can increase the ability to learn compared with keyboard typing once the individuals are accustomed to it.”
Handwriting helps retention better than typing.
I don't buy it. I think the method they used worked, but I don't think the blanket statement is fair. My handwriting sucks, and writing quickly for more than a few minutes hurts my hands.
Handwriting sucking is irrelevant. You don't need to read it afterward to get the benefits the study is talking about. The point of handwriting is that you need to process and summarize the information.
If you review the information later, the difference between the two will be negligible.
I personally almost never review lecture notes and instead go to the textbook. Professors can make mistakes, books are usually more accurate, but a lecture is more interactive so both have value. But I definitely prefer the text over my notes regardless.
What we did in school and uni never required processing and summarizing anything. Teacher/lecturer would simply dictate and we had to write down anything that what explicitly preceded by "write this down". I'd agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that's totally irrelevant and doesn't have anything to do with writing,
Really? That sounds like way too much hand-holding for a college course. I certainly had times when the teacher told us things that would definitely be on the test, but they didn't do that for anywhere near the majority of the test content, only when rattling off a bunch of trivia and noting which of that was actually necessary to remember (i.e. remember start and end dates of WW2, but not the date of every battle).
Tests should be more about concepts rather than trivia, so "write this down" shouldn't be a very common thing.
But it's not. Studies have shown that handwritten notes improve absorption of material. You can obviously get the same results by improving other study methods (i.e. reviewing and editing digital notes later), but if we're strictly talking about note-taking itself (i.e. if you discard the notes afterward), handwritten notes are superior. So if you're in a situation where you have audio (or better yet, transcribed) lectures, handwritten notes can improve your mastery of the content. You'll get much more value from recording lectures and hand-writing notes during class than typing notes into a computer.
So studies have shown that something is true that was never true for me in practice. Well, maybe I did something wrong. Those who never tried taking handwritten notes in their lives should definitely try, maybe it works for them. Or maybe they will simply enjoy it. Doesn't hurt to try.