Did you take a course or class lately? Went to a conference? Made notes during a talk or sermon? How did you take notes?
Chances are you used your laptop, iPad, or another digital advice. Because that’s what most of us do these days, since handwritten notes, they’re so nineties, right?
Wrong.
As it turns out, taking notes by hand has benefits. A recent study compared students who took notes on a laptop with those who took notes by hand. The writers did far better than the digital note takers on the tests.
A logical explanation would be that the laptop users got distracted by social media for instance, but that wasn’t the case. They weren’t allowed to use any other programs or apps.
The biggest reason was the note taking itself. When we write by hand, we tend to focus on what’s most important, whereas we can type way faster than we write and thus tend to take notes almost verbatim. Hand writers were processing and selecting information while taking notes, thus studying more efficiently.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Either get that pen and paper back, or learn to selectively take notes even when you type. Although the researchers instructed the typing students to do just that. They couldn’t manage it.
Or even more cool: get an app that transforms your handwriting on a tablet into neatly typed notes. That’s what we call the best of two worlds.
By the way, many students nowadays can’t even write fast enough anymore to take notes by hand. That’s a long ways from the endless notebooks of neatly written longhand notes I took in college!
Do you tend to take notes by hand or on a device? Do you experience a difference?
[via Fred Barbash, The Washington Post, April 28 201 | Image via LexnGer via Compfight cc]
Joe Gallant says
Recently wrote a blog post about sketch notes – changed the way I note-take! http://www.joegallant.co.uk/blog/sketchnotes-and-sermons/
Rachel Blom says
I LOVE this! What a great and creative way of taking sermon notes…