Typing vs handwriting

Typing gets more words down. Whether it helps you remember them is a closer contest than the headlines suggest.

Check your typing speed

In 2014 two psychologists published a paper with a title built for headlines: “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard”. Students who took lecture notes on laptops did worse on questions that made them think, and for the next decade the finding turned up in lecture halls, school policies and a great many articles telling you to put your laptop away.

Then other researchers tried to repeat it, and the story got more interesting. The short version: typing wins on speed by a wide margin, handwriting may have a small edge for learning, and how you take notes matters more than what you take them with.

Speed: not a contest

An average typist manages about 52 words per minute, according to a 2018 study of 168,960 people (average typing speed has the details). Handwriting is much slower. When 300 university students in South Africa were screened with a five-minute copying task, they averaged about 23 words per minute, with the slowest at 13 and the fastest at 34. A standard British assessment of handwriting speed for 17- to 25-year-olds puts the average at about 26 words per minute when copying neatly and 36 when writing as fast as possible.

So an average typist puts words down about twice as fast as an average writer, and a 100 WPM typist about four times as fast. On a 1,500-word essay, that's about 65 minutes of pure handwriting at 23 WPM against 29 minutes of typing at 52 WPM, before anyone has had a thought. The typing time calculator runs the same sum for any length and speed.

In a lecture, the gap shows up in the notes. In a 2021 study at Tufts University, students watched a TED talk and took notes: those typing wrote about 231 words on average, those writing by hand about 136. More words sounds like better notes. Whether it is depends on what the words are.

The study everyone quotes

Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer ran three experiments. In the first, 67 students at Princeton watched TED talks and took notes either on a laptop, with the internet switched off, or on paper. After a break filled with other tasks, they answered questions about the talk. On factual questions the two groups did about equally well. On conceptual questions, the ones that asked students to apply or connect ideas, the laptop group did worse.

The explanation was in the notes. Laptop notes were longer and contained more of the speaker's exact words. The typists were transcribing; the handwriters couldn't keep up, so they had to choose what mattered and put it in their own words, which is a form of thinking about it. In a second experiment, warning laptop users not to take notes word for word made no difference: they did it anyway. In a third, students came back a week later and were allowed to review their notes before the test, and the handwriters still came out ahead.

It's a tidy story with a believable mechanism, which is exactly why it spread so far and so fast.

What happened when others checked

In 2019, Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson repeated the experiment and added two groups: one taking notes on an electronic writing pad and one taking no notes at all. The differences between laptop and longhand were small, and the authors concluded that deciding which method is better “seems premature”.

In 2021, Heather Urry and colleagues at Tufts ran a preregistered direct replication of the first experiment with 142 students. They confirmed the part about the notes. Laptop notes were longer and more verbatim: about 13% of their words matched the lecture word for word, against about 8% for handwritten notes. The test results didn't follow. The laptop group did no worse on factual or on conceptual questions, and a small meta-analysis of eight similar studies showed the same pattern. In the authors' words, the results “do not support the idea that longhand note-taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information”.

The two big reviews since then disagree, gently. A 2022 meta-analysis by Voyer, Ronis and Byers, pooling 77 effect sizes from 36 articles, concluded that the handwriting advantage seen in some studies may be explained, at least partly, by the distractions that come with digital devices. A 2024 meta-analysis led by Abraham Flanigan, covering 24 studies of college students with about 3,000 participants, found a small advantage for handwritten notes on later achievement, larger when students got to review their notes, even though the typists wrote far more.

How small is small? The 2024 review's effect size works out to this: pick one handwriter and one typist at random, and the handwriter scores higher about 57 times in 100 rather than 50. That's worth knowing. It isn't a reason to throw your laptop in a river.

What the brain studies show

You'll also see headlines saying handwriting lights up the brain. The best-known recent study, by Ruud van der Weel and Audrey van der Meer in Norway, recorded the brain activity of 36 university students through a 256-sensor EEG net while they wrote words in cursive with a digital pen and typed the same words. Handwriting produced far more widespread connections between brain regions, in patterns the authors link to memory and learning.

Two details matter. First, the study measured brain activity, not learning: nobody was tested on what they remembered. Second, “typing” in this experiment meant pressing the keys with the right index finger only, a choice the authors made to keep the two halves of the brain from muddying the signal. That's a long way from how a touch typist uses ten fingers, so it tells you little about typing as most people do it.

The evidence is clearer for young children learning their letters. In a 2012 brain-imaging study, fifteen children aged 4 to 5 who couldn't yet read practised letters by printing them, typing them or tracing them. Afterwards, the brain network that readers use to recognise letters became active when the children looked at letters they had written by hand, but not at letters they had typed or traced. It's a small study, but it points the same way as most school curricula, which teach handwriting first and add the keyboard a few years later. Typing for kids covers when that's worth starting.

The distraction problem

A laptop's biggest drawback in a lecture may have nothing to do with typing. In a 2013 study by Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas Cepeda, students who were asked to do a handful of unrelated online tasks during a lecture, the kind of browsing many students do anyway, scored 55% on a comprehension test afterwards, against 66% for those who only took notes. In a second experiment, students who simply sat where they could see other people multitasking on laptops scored 56%, against 73% for those with a clear view of the lecture. They weren't using laptops at all; they were just watching someone else's screen.

This is the strongest practical argument for paper, and it's really about attention rather than pens. A laptop with one notes window open, notifications off and the browser closed is a different tool from one with fifteen tabs. It's also the effect Voyer's team suspected was behind some of the handwriting advantage.

What makes notes useful

Put the studies together and a pattern appears: the tool matters less than what your head does while you use it. Notes help in two ways. Taking them makes you process the material, and reviewing them later brings it back. Handwriting forces the first, because you can't write as fast as anyone speaks, so you have to choose and summarise. Typing lets you skip it, because you can keep up just well enough to copy without thinking.

That suggests a simple rule. If you type, type like a handwriter: fewer words, your own phrasing, and no copying out whole sentences of what the speaker said. And whichever you use, review your notes. In the 2024 review, the handwriting advantage was larger when students reviewed their notes, and Dunlosky, one of the replication's authors, has argued that what you do with notes afterwards matters more than how you took them.

Which to use when

Lecture notes

Either works if you use it well. If you type, close everything else and summarise rather than transcribe. If the slides are posted online anyway, the content is already captured, so your own notes can be the thinking: questions, examples, connections, the bit you didn't understand.

Revising for a test

Close your notes and write down everything you remember, then check what you missed. Testing yourself like this, called practice testing or retrieval practice, is one of the two study techniques a major 2013 review rated most useful, and it works on paper or on screen. Writing a shorter summary by hand is a good second pass.

Essays, reports and anything long

Type. Speed matters when there's a lot to write, and editing on a screen is so much easier that you'll restructure more freely: move a paragraph, cut a sentence, try a better opening. Searching, backing up and sharing come free.

Meetings and to-do lists

Use whichever you'll actually look at again. A notebook you never reopen helps nobody, and typed notes can be searched in a second.

Young children

Handwriting first, while they're learning to recognise and form letters. Keyboard lessons can follow in the later primary years, alongside handwriting rather than instead of it.

Handwritten exams

If your exams are on paper, practise on paper. Writing by hand for two or three hours is a physical skill in its own right, and a term of typed notes won't train it.

Getting the best of both

You don't have to pick a side. These combinations give you the speed of one and the processing of the other:

• Type in the lecture, then spend ten minutes the same day writing a one-page summary by hand from memory.
• Handwrite in class, then type up a clean version in the evening. Typing it up is a second pass through the material, and the result is searchable.
• For a first draft, talk instead of typing, then edit on the keyboard. Speaking is faster than either: see dictation in typing tips and tricks.
• Sketch diagrams on paper even if everything else is typed. Arrows and boxes are quicker by hand than in any app.

If you type, make it invisible

Much of the case against typing is really a case against slow typing. If you look down at the keys while someone is talking, you lose their thread and fall back on copying whatever is on the slide. If you touch type, your eyes stay on the speaker and your attention stays on the ideas, and typing stops getting in the way of thinking. That's worth a few weeks of practice: how to type without looking has a plan, and how to type faster covers the next step.

Where to start

For your next two weeks of lectures or meetings, pick one rule and keep it. If you type, close every other window and write nothing you couldn't have phrased yourself. If you write by hand, leave a margin for questions. Either way, spend ten minutes the same evening writing down what you remember, then check it against your notes. By the end of the fortnight you'll know which suits you better than any study can tell you. If typing wins, take a one-minute typing test to see where your speed stands.

Sources

• Mueller and Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking”, Psychological Science 25(6), 2014 (doi).
• Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)”, Educational Psychology Review 31(3), 2019 (doi).
• Urry and colleagues, “Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies”, Psychological Science, 2021 (preregistration and data: osf.io/tr868).
• Voyer, Ronis and Byers, “The effect of notetaking method on academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis”, Contemporary Educational Psychology 68, 2022 (doi).
• Flanigan and colleagues, “Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis”, Educational Psychology Review 36, 2024.
• Van der Weel and Van der Meer, “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom”, Frontiers in Psychology, 2024 (doi).
• James and Engelhardt, “The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children”, Trends in Neuroscience and Education 1(1), 2012 (doi).
• Sana, Weston and Cepeda, “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers”, Computers & Education 62, 2013 (doi).
• Franzsen and Stewart, “Identifying the factors that contribute to handwriting problems experienced by students at a higher education institution in South Africa”, South African Journal of Occupational Therapy 44(1), 2014; it reports the norms of Barnett, Henderson, Scheib and Schulz, Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting 17+ (DASH 17+), 2010.
• “Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here's What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019 (John Dunlosky's comments on reviewing notes).
• Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham, “Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques”, Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1), 2013.
• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018.