Why writing by hand helps you remember: what research says, and what it doesn't

Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer had students watch talks and take notes either on a laptop or by hand: "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard", Psychological Science 25(6), 2014, pp. 1159–1168.

The result: on laptops, participants wrote more, and more of it word for word. On questions about understanding, those writing by hand did better. The authors' explanation: writing more slowly forces you to summarise, and you think more about the content.

The study was widely cited and quickly became the rule "you learn better by hand". It isn't that simple, as the next studies show.

• Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019) repeated and extended the study: Educational Psychology Review 31, pp. 753–780. The clear advantage did not come back. In one test right afterwards, those writing by hand did better on factual questions; other tests showed no difference, and in a test two days later the method made no difference. The authors write that which method is better remains unclear.
• Urry and colleagues (2021) repeated the first study of 2014 as closely as possible: "Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet", Psychological Science 32(3), pp. 326–339. Again, laptop users wrote more and more verbatim. But there was no clear difference in results. A small meta-analysis across similar studies showed no reliable effect either.

What holds across all three: on a laptop you write more, and more word for word. Whether that hurts learning is less certain than often claimed.

Flanigan, Wheeler, Colliot, Lu and Kiewra combined 24 studies on lecture notes: Educational Psychology Review 36, article 78, 2024.

• Handwritten notes went with somewhat better achievement. The effect is small (the authors report g ≈ 0.25).
• Typed notes captured much more.
• On tests right after the lecture there was no consistent difference.
• Students who could review their notes before the test benefited more.

A meta-analysis shows patterns across many studies. It doesn't show that the pen alone writes things into memory.

Van der Weel and Van der Meer measured brain activity (EEG) in 36 students while they wrote words with a digital pen or typed them: Frontiers in Psychology 14, 1219945, 2024. Writing by hand showed more connections between brain regions than typing.

That is a difference in brain activity, not a learning result. The study did not measure whether participants remembered more later. Findings like this fit the idea that handwriting engages the brain differently, but they don't prove a learning advantage.

• Write in your own words. The possible advantage of handwriting comes from choosing and rephrasing. Copying word for word by hand gains little.
• Review your notes. This is where the studies most nearly agree. Notes that sit on a shelf hardly help you remember.
• Quiz yourself. Actively recalling something, rather than just reading it again, is one of the best-studied ways to learn. More in the glossary under spaced repetition.
• Use the tool you actually use. Paper, tablet or laptop: what counts is that you look again afterwards.

Axsuro doesn't make you smarter, and we don't claim you remember more with it. It does take over the part where handwritten notes often fail: finding them again and reviewing them.

• Search: one photo of the page, and every line can be found with ⌘K.
• Ask: ask your own notes a question and get an answer with links to the pages.
• Study mode (flashcards), Plus and up: questions with answers and study material from your pages become flashcards with spaced repetition, plus "Quiz me". How it works is in Flashcards from handwritten notes.
• "On this day": on Home, Axsuro shows a page from a year, a month or a week ago, on every plan.

Whether paper or a tablet suits you better is compared in E-ink tablet or notebook.

• Flashcards from handwritten notes
  Turn notes into flashcards: write q: and a: by hand, photograph the page, and Axsuro builds a deck per notebook with five boxes for spaced repetition.
• E-ink tablet or notebook: what really helps you think
  reMarkable, Kindle Scribe, Boox or a paper notebook? A calm comparison: what each does well, where it falls short and how to make paper searchable.
• For teachers: plan on paper, stop searching
  Plan lessons and take notes in staff meetings and parent talks on paper, as you always have. Axsuro turns them into tasks, events and searchable notes.