The development of technology has made our life so much easier, maybe even too easy, to the point where we can call ourselves lazy.   

The internet has ways to find out how to do almost everything from YouTube tutorials to Wikihows, theirs is almost nothing you cannot find on the internet.  

How easy is it to forget the other sources of information that we’ve always had before the normalization of smartphones and the daily access of the internet? CDs, books, newspapers, or other printed mediums have now been slowly fading away.  

Yet with all this digital development, paper notes are the way to go on the academic road. When you take the time to write down your notes, the LED lights do not get in the way and with the notes being in your own words and style, in theory it is easier to memorize.   

A similar article on the Advertiser’s Printing website quotes a study that the harsh lights of our devices cause exhaustion easier than regular eye-to-paper studying and can even mess with our comprehension abilities.  

It is true that with screens we may say that we read through the material faster, but can we say that we truly understand what’s being told? What details could one miss from the constant and trained “skimming” we’re used to when confronted with an entire condensed page of text.   

Researcher Ziming Liu also notes that “…screen-based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in-depth reading, concentrated reading and decreasing sustained attention.” 

It shows that taking the time to actually comprehend and absorb the given information instead of adhering to our usual fast-paced skimming can only be beneficial when we have academic goals.