Take one look around the lecture hall, and you’re hit with a sea of students buried in their screens and notebooks. Some opt for laptops, rapidly typing away at their keyboards as the professor rambles on about cells and microbes. Some tap and glide across their tablets, annotating slides in 20 different colors. Others break out a pencil-eraser combo as they scratch at pristine sheets of college-ruled composition notebooks. Every person has a unique tool in hand, and from key clicks to pencil scrapes, no lecture is the same.
The Traditional
COVID-19 accelerated the digitization of university, and traditional forms of pen and paper note-taking have slowly phased out of popularity. It only takes a glance in a Cornell lecture hall to notice that the landscape has morphed into one of glowing screens. That being said, some still enjoy the familiarity offered by traditional writing tools.
One of the main perks of this note-taking method is that it's easy to access. Compared to most tablets and higher-end computers that can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to get the most out of, it doesn’t take much to reach the peak of simple pencil and paper. Another advantage, which is also one of the primary reasons for students’ preference for handwriting, is that it enhances content retention and understanding through the muscle memory of physically writing notes. Rather than aimlessly typing away at the keyboard, traditional note-taking forces you to pay attention to the letters you’re writing. If you don’t, slanted text haunts your future. The inability to surf the web also makes pen and paper a distraction-free method.
Still, traditional methods suffer from numerous disadvantages that have become increasingly difficult to justify in the digital era. Unlike digital options, the only ‘Undo’ button available to traditional notetakers is the rubber eraser. For those who are familiar with the inevitable presence of mistakes, what was once a smooth sheet of paper can instantly become a crumpled mess. Another issue is space, with many students going through multiple notebooks per semester. After a while, this weight builds up, leaving you with a backpack piled with regret. Compared to the digital landscape, where years' worth of notes can all be housed in a single Google document, pen and paper have their physical limits.
The Digital
As the days of traditional note-taking are slowly replaced by more modern methods, digital note-taking has undoubtedly become one of the most common ways to take notes at Cornell.
While tablet note-taking and pen and paper note-taking share many similarities in how you’re required to physically write out the words you wish to jot down, the tablet gains many advantages from simply being a part of the digital world. Two of the more popular note-taking apps at Cornell are Goodnotes and Notability, which each highlight different aspects of digital note-taking. Goodnotes mirrors a traditional notebook style, but can change the type of line within (grid, lined, blank), and hosts an infinite number of pages. The app offers a variety of colored pens that emulate the texture of both pencil and marker. What’s more, you can upload course material and slides directly from a class Canvas page, allowing you to annotate directly on them. Any errors in writing can be corrected easily with an ‘Undo’ button, or an eraser that leaves no trace. Notability has many similar features, while also hosting a less structured, infinite vertical scrolling experience. While the former offers a more structured and distinct organization method, the latter promotes folder-and-divider systems that allow for flexibility.
A tablet also allows you to type out your notes, similar to how one might do so on a computer. Though it doesn’t have a physical keyboard, but an online one, which might anger those who feel as if they have to touch keys for it to count, the option still exists. In dire situations where the pen and paper have no say, and your computer has dwindled to its last seconds of life, the tablet’s versatility is just what would save you.
In lecture halls, for those who prefer not to handwrite their notes, typing notes on a computer is always an option. OneNote, a Microsoft Office application provided by your Cornell student account, along with Google Docs are two popular online platforms used by Cornellians. Both apps are word processors that allow students to quickly note down lecture content without having to handwrite meticulously. It’s far faster than handwritten note-taking, which is why it’s the readily favored method in classes that don’t require diagrams or drawings. However, for classes that do, like chemistry and mathematics, this method of note-taking simply doesn’t make the cut.
The Best Note-Taking Method for Cornellians
With all these different note-taking methods at play in Cornell’s lecture halls, which is the most effective? My preference undoubtedly lies with the digital tablet. With apps like Goodnotes, the tablet’s note-taking capabilities have been further optimized. A compromise of traditional and digital note-taking extremes, the tablet’s versatility proves why it’s such a popular option among Cornell students.
Stefanie Chen is a sophomore in the College of Human Ecology. She can be reached at sc3363@cornell.edu.
