Efficiency Tips On Reading
As we step up our education from Primary, Secondary to tertiary education (including professional growth courses and University education), our requirements to study materials and information are constantly increasing.
Each new level of education category brings up a wider scope of subjects, information web and much more research materials/articles/subject-books. In order to efficiently read and remember the topics, a strategic method to dissect and compartmentalize the information on hand will be vital.
Especially towards upper levels of education, there are these 3 main categories of “school work” to handle:
Reading, writing and noting down knowledge – Portrait Images Asia / Nonwarit
Lectures:
Lectures are based on assigned topics. Reading up early on the topics will alleviate your understanding during the lecture.
Focus: Ask questions or align your questions on what you don’t understand. It becomes clear-cut to you on “what you know and what you don’t” if you have perform read-ahead on the topics involved.
Tutorials:
Tutorials are reflective learning scenarios of the lecture topics themselves.
Assignments:
Research on topics related and explore them for a better understanding.
What you should do?
Stick to your reading strategy – pinkomelet
Do we need to read every word? Regardless of an article/research material/subject book, we should be selective of what we read and retain in our memories.
How do we do that?
Read with a purpose in mind
Put yourself in the delivery end of the writing/article, what the writer plans to convey. Identify keywords and key sentences that explain the theory/book/content.
Tally what you know against the topics
The goal of learning any topic is to establish “what you know” against “what you don’t”. Where facts, theory and equations come into first contact, they need to be tallied to our own knowledge.
Compartmentalize the reading materials
Paragraphs and content are divided into different topics and content layers. If we are able to compartmentalize the reading materials, we have already associated their content category. Then we can assess keywords for association.
Keep track of what information you need to retain
There may be too much information that are of interest/vital importance in the topics. Pick and remember core important concepts, sentences and keywords. There are many tools in the new-age applications which we can easily do this with.
Evernote is one of the perfect tool for such purposes. Mediawiki is a free wiki for you to start your own digital library of knowledge.
Evernote Productivity App
Reading Strategies
- Pick up key words and reflect understanding on the sentence
- Scan for headings, bullet-points and bold text.
- Read first and last sentences of any paragraph as it explains most of the content within the paragraph
- If understanding is unclear on first and last sentences, read the entire paragraph, since the information is then required to be fully digested with the middle content
- Relate important information to things you already know
- Highlight and keep a repository for information reference
- in order to to build information reference, a topic title with a source of personal learning references/title references has the most impact in association
- Keep track of the most important paragraph to reinforce understanding
Mediawiki – hosting your own wiki
Concentration
Concentrate during reading to ensure there are no missed out keywords/sentences.
Speed
Control your speed of reading. If there are difficult/complex theories or sentences to digest, spend the time! Reading without understanding is of no point on its own.
Speed up when the topics or content are better manageable.
Understanding
Record down details where you don’t understand. New learning tools such as Evernote, hosting your own wiki, provides a platform to record everything you need to learn and refer to.
Memorisation
Mind-mapping can sometimes be the correct direction to establish knowledge framework on the topic
You know you’ve gone wrong when you’re mind-mapping like this.
However do not go overboard on it as it can quickly spiral out of control if you are noting down non-important knowledge as keywords.
Mnemonics are extremely useful to remember knowledge elements.
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