Improving your notes with colourful highlights is an excellent way of pretending to work. Students spend hours coloring in their notes — Pink for memorize! Blue for useful! Green for Organic Chemistry! — blissfully watching that clock tick down until they’ve burned a whole hour and can gorge guilt-free on Netflix.
Wait, you want your studying to improve your understanding of the material? Not just count down the clock, pretending that the exam tests how long you spent sitting near your notes instead of how well you understand them? Then you’re doing better than most. And need a better studying strategy.
If you want to improve your notes then the best way is rewriting them. Not just copying them out — you’re no medieval monk transcribing ancient texts in a world where books are precious rarities — but reinterpreting and reorganizing them. Read the original notes then make them much easier to use. Turn paragraphs of text into bullet points. Extract urgent equations onto their own little flash card. Rearrange pages so that the equation is at the start, then the explanation and derivation connected underneath.
This helps you understand your subject by pouring it all through your mind as you work with it. (As opposed to the highlighters, who think the fluorescent marker is some kind of supermarket scanner able to upload the information into their brains by drawing bright lightness over it.) It’ll also help you learn how you learn. Do you prefer bulleted lists? Do you doodle shapes to help remember arrangements of ideas? Do you work with words or symbols? The act of understanding your own notes enough to rewrite them improves both the understanding and the notes. Rewriting them is a powerful form of studying all by itself, and then it makes it easy to study even more.
Anyone can highlight anything. I could sit down right now and highlight the Sigsand Manuscript, and that’s an entirely fictional document of magical spells. And it wouldn’t matter because you don’t really need to understand something to highlight it. People tell themselves they’re picking out important parts, but what they’re really doing is telling their own brain “the important stuff is down there on the page, see, I’m showing you where. So if you ever need it you KNOW, deep down, that you can come back to this colorful page and find it again.”
Does that sound like a useful lesson for exams?
Wait, you want your studying to improve your understanding of the material? Not just count down the clock, pretending that the exam tests how long you spent sitting near your notes instead of how well you understand them? Then you’re doing better than most. And need a better studying strategy.
If you want to improve your notes then the best way is rewriting them. Not just copying them out — you’re no medieval monk transcribing ancient texts in a world where books are precious rarities — but reinterpreting and reorganizing them. Read the original notes then make them much easier to use. Turn paragraphs of text into bullet points. Extract urgent equations onto their own little flash card. Rearrange pages so that the equation is at the start, then the explanation and derivation connected underneath.
You’re no medieval monk transcribing ancient texts in a world where books are precious rarities.
This helps you understand your subject by pouring it all through your mind as you work with it. (As opposed to the highlighters, who think the fluorescent marker is some kind of supermarket scanner able to upload the information into their brains by drawing bright lightness over it.) It’ll also help you learn how you learn. Do you prefer bulleted lists? Do you doodle shapes to help remember arrangements of ideas? Do you work with words or symbols? The act of understanding your own notes enough to rewrite them improves both the understanding and the notes. Rewriting them is a powerful form of studying all by itself, and then it makes it easy to study even more.
Anyone can highlight anything. I could sit down right now and highlight the Sigsand Manuscript, and that’s an entirely fictional document of magical spells. And it wouldn’t matter because you don’t really need to understand something to highlight it. People tell themselves they’re picking out important parts, but what they’re really doing is telling their own brain “the important stuff is down there on the page, see, I’m showing you where. So if you ever need it you KNOW, deep down, that you can come back to this colorful page and find it again.”
Does that sound like a useful lesson for exams?
