Notes, papers and essays without looking at the keys

Laptop notes: what the research says

In a well-known 2014 study, Mueller and Oppenheimer found that students who took notes on a laptop did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand. The authors explained it this way: on a laptop, people tend to transcribe the lecture word for word instead of processing it in their own words.

Later research made the picture messier. In 2019, Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson repeated the study and added new conditions. They saw some trends in favor of longhand, but performance did not consistently differ between groups, and the authors wrote that declaring a winner was premature. In 2021, a team at Tufts University ran a direct replication with about 140 students. Laptop notes again had more words and more verbatim overlap, but the two groups did not differ significantly on the quiz, for either factual or conceptual questions.

A 2024 meta-analysis by Flanigan and colleagues pooled 24 studies of college students. Students who typed recorded far more of the lecture, but students who took and reviewed handwritten notes scored somewhat higher on achievement measures. Earlier reviews, the authors note, were mixed, and some found no difference at all.

So there is no clear winner. Several authors recommend writing in your own words instead of transcribing, and going back to your notes. Reviewing your notes is where much of the benefit comes from.

More words in your notes do not mean more knowledge. What matters is what you do with them afterward.

If you take notes on a laptop

Plenty of students take notes on a laptop anyway. If you are one of them, it pays to type in a way that does not steal your attention.

In a lecture you need to look at the professor, at the board and at the slides. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland used eye tracking to see where people look while typing. Self-taught typists looked at the keyboard 41% of the time, touch typists about 20%. Every glance down is a moment when you are not seeing what is happening at the front of the room.

Notes are always a selection. The goal is not to capture everything, it is to capture what matters. When you do not have to hunt for letters, more of your attention can go to choosing what to write and putting it in your own words.

A few practical rules:

• write in your own words, not a word-for-word transcript,
• sketch diagrams and graphs on paper, where they are faster to draw,
• go back to your notes before the exam, since reviewing is where much of the benefit is,
• turn off notifications and keep only your notes document open.

Eyes on the speaker, ideas in your own words, fingers on their home keys.

Papers and a senior thesis, in numbers

In high school you write essays, research papers and lab reports. In college the papers get longer, and many programs end with a senior thesis or capstone project. Length requirements depend entirely on your school, your department and your instructor, so check the syllabus or your thesis guidelines.

Typing is only part of the work. Reading and thinking take far longer, and you type more slowly when you are composing: in a 1999 study, people averaged 33 words per minute when copying text and 19 when writing their own. Every chapter you rewrite, you type again.

Jumping from 26 to 52 words per minute, as in the comparison below, is a big step. In the large Aalto University study, people who said they had taken a typing course were on average only about 5 WPM faster than those who had not. Smaller gains still add up, though: on an 11,000-word thesis, going from 30 to 40 WPM saves about an hour and a half of pure typing.

To give you a sense of scale, here is how long it takes just to type a finished text at 26 WPM, the edge of the slowest 10% in that study, and at the average of 52 WPM. For the math we assume 275 words per double-spaced page:

• a 10-page research paper, about 2,750 words: roughly 1 hour 45 minutes vs. 53 minutes,
• a 40-page senior thesis, about 11,000 words: roughly 7 hours vs. 3 hours 30 minutes,
• a 60-page thesis, about 16,500 words: roughly 10 hours 35 minutes vs. 5 hours 15 minutes.

Fast fingers will not write your thesis for you. But the time you save can go into the content.

Think about the argument, not the letters

When you write your own text, your mind does many things at once: it decides what you want to say, builds the sentence, searches for the right word and keeps an eye on spelling. If it also has to search for keys, you are giving it one more job.

In a 2008 study, researchers compared 34 university students with low and high typing skill while they wrote narratives. For the less skilled typists, the act of typing took up more mental capacity, and their texts were rated lower. The study was small and did not test a typing course, so it does not show that a course automatically makes your writing better.

In touch typing, every letter has its own finger. Researchers at Aalto University noticed that fast typists consistently press each letter with the same finger, and they suggest this reduces the need to look at the keys and to decide which finger presses which key. That is exactly what you practice from the first lesson.

It matters most with the keys you use less often: numbers, punctuation, parentheses, @ and $. Citations, dates, page numbers and statistics in a paper are full of them. Module 6 of the course is devoted to numbers and symbols.

When your fingers know where to go, your mind can stay with the argument.

AP exams and tests on a screen

More and more exams happen on a computer. The College Board now gives most AP Exams in its Bluebook testing app. On fully digital exams, students complete both the multiple-choice and the free-response questions in Bluebook instead of a paper booklet. AP English Language and Composition, AP English Literature and Composition, AP United States History and AP Psychology are among the fully digital exams.

That means the timed essays you practiced in class are now written on a keyboard, under the clock. Some exams are hybrid: multiple choice in Bluebook, free responses still handwritten. Check the current list for your subjects on AP Central.

Touch typing will not earn you points on an AP Exam. Content knowledge and a clear argument do. But on a timed essay, it helps when you are not hunting for keys and can keep your eyes on the prompt and on your own paragraph.

In college, the format of an exam depends on the course and the instructor. Some exams are in person on paper, some are online, and many papers and theses are submitted electronically through a learning management system. Your syllabus is the place to check.

On a digital AP Exam, what you know decides your score. The keyboard should not slow you down.

Part-time jobs and your first job

Many students work while in school. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 40% of full-time undergraduates and 74% of part-time undergraduates were employed in 2020. Among full-time students, about one in four worked 20 or more hours a week.

Some student jobs are almost all typing: customer support over chat and email, data entry, transcription, office work at the campus library or front desk, or running social media for a small business. In jobs like these, speed and accuracy show up right away, in the number of messages you handle and in the mistakes someone has to fix later.

Your first office job continues the pattern. In 2023, Microsoft looked at data from its own workplace apps and found that the average employee spent 57% of their time communicating: in meetings, email and chat. Not all of that is typing, but someone has to write those emails and messages.

After the final exam in Touchtypely, you get a certificate with a public verification link. It is not an official credential, but a link that anyone can check says more than "proficient in Microsoft Office" on a résumé.

Your part-time job is not where you learn to type. It is where you need it.

When you type all afternoon

When you are writing a paper or finishing your thesis, it is easy to sit at the computer for an entire afternoon. On a laptop, the screen is attached to the keyboard, so it usually sits lower than ergonomic guidelines recommend.

The simple fix for long sessions at home: use an external keyboard and raise the laptop, for example on a stand or a stack of books, so the top of the screen is closer to eye level. Take a break between sections, stand up and look away from the screen.

We will not promise that touch typing cures neck or back pain. We have not found a study that tested that directly. But when you are not looking at the keys, you do not have to bend your head toward them, and your eyes stay on the text.

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommends these basics for computer work:

• head upright, facing forward and in line with the torso,
• shoulders relaxed, elbows close to the body and bent at roughly 90 to 120 degrees,
• wrists and forearms straight, about parallel to the floor,
• feet flat on the floor or on a footrest,
• the top of the screen at or slightly below eye level.

A break between sections is not laziness. It is part of a good setup.

How to fit it in around classes

The course has 26 lessons in six modules, starting on the home row. Module 6 covers numbers and symbols, including an optional numeric keypad lesson you can skip on a laptop without one. A lesson takes 5 to 8 minutes, about 2 to 3.5 hours in total. At one lesson a day, you finish in about a month.

In a classic 1978 study, people who practiced typing one hour a day learned most efficiently, and those with two two-hour sessions a day learned least efficiently. That study compared longer sessions than our lessons. Short daily lessons are our recommendation based on the same principle.

Expect to slow down first. In an Israeli study, university students without learning disabilities were actually slower right after 14 touch typing lessons than before the program. Three months later, though, they were faster than at the start, and accuracy stayed above 95% throughout. So do not start the week before a paper is due or during finals. Summer break or the first weeks of a semester are better.

After the course, daily training continues at 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes, built from your weak keys, the keys that are starting to slip and a text from a genre you pick, such as science, history or business. You can also choose specific keys to drill. After each exercise you see your words per minute, accuracy, error rate, rhythm and the keys you mix up most.

Start in a calm week. Speed comes once your fingers learn the way.