AbstractTwenty university students (ten men and ten women) were videotaped while they copied two sets of notes with different layouts from an overhead projector screen. They were timed as they read silently a prose passage and wrote a familiar sentence five times. Copying speed was related to writing speed but not to reading speed. Copying was faster and errors fewer when a paragraph of unfamiliar notes was laid out to emphasise the meaningful structure of the text. Similar changes to the layout of familiar notes already structured into meaningful parts did not reduce copying time or errors. The intervals between the students’glances was very variable and ranged from 3.2‐13.8 sec which has implications for the study of human information processing. The average student made 12 copying errors and those who glanced least often made the most errors. The practical implications of the results were discus