Notebook or laptop? The question comes back every school year, in lecture halls and classrooms alike. You hear everything and its opposite: “paper helps you remember,” “a laptop is faster.” Both sides are a little bit right, and the research is less clear-cut than people say. Here’s what each one really does better, and how to keep the best of both.
What the notebook does better
Memory: what the research really says
The most cited study is by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published in 2014 in Psychological Science under the title “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Students who took notes on a laptop tended to copy the lecture word for word. Those who wrote by hand put things in their own words more often, and did better on the comprehension questions.
That study went around the world. It also got checked. In 2019, Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson replicated it in Educational Psychology Review. Their results show no consistent difference between the groups, and they conclude it’s too early to name one method as better.
The takeaway fits in one sentence: the tool matters less than what you do with it. Copying your teacher word for word doesn’t help you learn, with a pen or a keyboard. Rewording, sorting, summarizing does. A notebook pushes you there naturally, because your hand can’t keep up with someone talking. On a keyboard, you have to do it on purpose. We show you how in five ways to take notes faster on a keyboard.
Free layout
In a notebook, you write wherever you want. An underlined heading, an arrow in the margin, a box around a definition, the date in the top right corner. You build your page as the class goes on, and the page becomes a visual landmark. Weeks later, you remember the formula was “bottom left, boxed in red.”
Diagrams
An arrow between two ideas, a two-way table, a triangle in geometry, a timeline in history: on paper, it takes a few seconds. On a computer, it often means opening a menu, picking a shape, placing it. Meanwhile, your teacher has kept going.
What the laptop does better
Speed
If you touch-type, you can keep up with speech your hand can’t follow. That’s gold in a lecture hall, when the professor dictates little and talks a lot, or in a meeting when everyone talks at once.
Search
On paper, finding a concept means flipping through pages. On a computer, you type a word and land right on it. The night before a test, that changes everything.
Losing nothing
A notebook gets lost on the bus, soaked in the rain, torn. Notes saved online survive a forgotten backpack, and you find them again on another device.
Carrying nothing
Six subjects, six notebooks, plus the binders. With a laptop or a tablet, it all fits in one device, and your backpack gets that much lighter.
What you lose with Word or Google Docs
When you switch to a laptop, the reflex is to open a word processor. It’s free, everybody has one, and it’s fast. The trouble shows up when it’s time to study.
Every page looks the same. Same font, same white background, same endless scrolling. Your math notes look like your history notes, which look like an email. You don’t recognize your notes anymore: nothing catches your eye, no page has a face.
These tools are made for writing clean documents, and they do it very well. Class notes live differently: you come back to them, you mark them up, you look for a visual landmark. On a word processor page, that landmark disappears.
Going back to paper brings those landmarks back. But you lose the speed and the search, and you’re back where you started.
Keep both: type on real ruled paper
There’s a third way: type on a keyboard and get the look of a notebook back. That’s what Cayer does. You type, and your text shows up in handwriting, sitting on real ruled paper: Seyès, Large grid, Small grid or Blank.
Each line sits on a bold line, like in a French school notebook. Your pages have a face again, and you keep the speed of the keyboard. If you want to understand what that ruling draws, we break it down in Seyès ruled paper: what are all those lines for?.
For diagrams, Cayer has shapes that snap to the grid: arrow, rectangle, circle, triangle, right angle, arc, axes. You can also insert a table whose rows land on the lines of the page, and highlight with your finger, a mouse or a stylus.
And you keep what the laptop does better. A word in the search box takes you back to the right page. Each page saves as you go and follows you from one device to the next. It all runs in the browser, on a laptop or a tablet.
| Paper notebook | Word processor | Cayer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing speed | your hand’s | the keyboard’s | the keyboard’s |
| Look of your notes | your handwriting, your ruling | a print font on a white background | handwriting on Seyès, Large grid, Small grid or Blank |
| Finding a concept | flip through pages | search for a word | search for a word in the typed text |
| Diagrams | freehand | menus and shapes | shapes that snap to the grid, or freehand drawing |
| Risk of losing it | the forgotten notebook | depends on the tool | page saved as you go |
| In your backpack | one notebook per subject | a laptop | a laptop or a tablet |
Writing is free: two subjects, thirty pages, Seyès paper, with no ads. The three other papers and unlimited subjects come with Cayer Pro, at €24/year or €2.99/month (see pricing).
So, notebook or laptop?
If you don’t have a laptop in class, or your school doesn’t allow one, the notebook is still the best tool. You can always type up a clean copy of your notes in the evening, so you can find them later.
If you have a laptop and you type fast, don’t stop yourself from using it. Just watch out for two traps: copying your teacher word for word, and drowning your classes in pages that all look the same.
And if you’re torn between several apps, compare them on a real class, with your real gear. If you already have Goodnotes in mind, we did the comparison in A Goodnotes alternative for PC.
In the end, the best notes are the ones you actually want to open again the night before the test.