This is certainly true for me, and it's sort of comforting to think it might be universal:
Walk into any university lecture hall and you're likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide. . . But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes. Now Robinson Meyer writes at The Atlantic that a new study finds that people remember lectures better when they've taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones. The research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.
The funny thing is, my handwriting is so bad that my notes have a very short shelf life -- they become almost unreadable to me within a few hours. But the very act of having taken notes made me focus on the lecture (or political speaker) in a way that made me remember more of it.
