Handwriting is gradually becoming a dying art. Most college students type nearly everything. Elementary and high schools across the country now view typing courses as the main choice. But what are we losing as handwriting loses its significance（重要性）in society? It's brain power, according to some studies.
Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California conducted a series of studies to prove the differences between students who wrote out their notes and those who typed notes. Participants（参与者）took notes on a lecture using one of the two methods and were tested on the material 30 minutes after the lecture and again a week later. The results of the research appeared in Psychological Science. The authors of the study noted that, while past studies on this topic tended to focus on the distractions（干扰）that resulted from using a computer, in this study, participants were using the laptops only to take notes. And handwriting still emerged as（成为）the champion.
That's not to say that typing doesn't have its benefits. ClearvueHealth recently took a deep dive into the findings of a study to assess pros and cons（评估利弊）of writing and typing. The typists could copy down significantly more words than the writers. But while more of the lecture's content was retained in the computer when typing. The tests that the participants took proved this. On the test 30 minutes after the lecture, typists and writers did more or less equally well on questions about the basic facts of the lecture, but typists faltered（结巴）when it came to more conceptual questions. Students who take handwritten notes need to quickly process the lesson and rewrite it in a way they can understand, giving them an advantage in remembering new concepts（概念）in the long term.
As for the later quiz, well, the results were similar. Students with handwritten notes were able to remember and still understand the concepts of the lecture after a week had passed. These participants were also more open to understanding new ideas. Clearly, writing by hand can make you smarter.
Computers aren't going away anytime soon, but that doesn't mean paper notebooks need to become obsolete. If your goal is to be able to set down facts, the efficiency of typing might best benefit you. But when it comes to truly dissecting（剖析）information, truly learning from it in the sense of making connections between analyzing the material, and retaining it in the long run, writing by hand is a better choice.
