Put Your Laptops Away Summary

Before there were laptops, students had to handwrite their notes. In this millennium, students all over the world have given up their pencils and paper for screens and keyboards. In “Attention Students: Put Your Laptops Away,” the unidentified author utilizes a study conducted on college students to effectively reinforce the claim that handwriting notes are more efficient for learning, rather than typing notes.
The author alludes to research conducted to reveal that “laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting.” When using technology, it was found to be “so easy to click over to Facebook,” or other social media during dull lectures. Students who utilize laptops are able to type verbatim notes, which means they are writing word for word what is being said in the lecture. Although writing verbatim notes allows students to avoid missing information, the author mentions how “you have to be slower when you take notes by hand,” which is “what makes it more useful in the long run.”

In the article, the author is quick to mention the flaws of typed notes and the advantages of handwritten notes. It is mentioned how in two of the three studies conducted, the “longhand note takers performed better” than the laptop users. Throughout the article, the author sticks to their view that handwritten notes are more conventional for classroom use than laptops. While the support for handwritten notes is superior, the author has failed to include any counter argument that could support the claim that typed notes are a better choice over writing notes by