I’m currently reading a few technical books and I thought it would be nice to share my method to make the most out of these readings. I’m most certaintly not the first one to use and talk about this method, but anyway, here it is.
This is a technique I’ve used for a several years now and it seems to fit well with me, it may not suit you as well, but you won’t know until you try it for yourself. I used it in college for studying computer science and I still use it today for pretty much anything involving the need to learn and/or memorize new information. At the moment, I’m learning japanese and reading a book about drawing techniques, I use the next method for both.
It’s basically done in 3 steps, but before going further I must specify that step 1 and step 2 are done at the same time, keep that in mind:
1- Read the original source of information.
You got to start somewhere, whether the source is a book, a magazine, an internet article or a tutorial, you have to read it all first. I take for granted that the source of information contains all the information needed to go around a subject. If it isn’t the case, the rest of the information lies probably somewhere else within your reach, it doesn’t change anything to the method itself beside the need of merging everything together at some point.
2- Take notes of the important things in a notebook as you read them.
It’s pretty important to do this step while reading, because you already have the information in front of your eyes and while you read, you can easily spot what you already know, what’s important to remember and what isn’t. So it’s the best time to note everything that will be useful to remember. The way you take notes in the notebook is a rather personal thing, just make sure that you’ll be able to understand when you’ll get to read them again in a few weeks/months/years. I personally have a strict set of rules that I try to constantly use in each notebook, a specific placement of text, empty lines, underlined titles, arrows and other visual cues. But it’s up to you to define what is the best for you. If you need to, draw sketches, tables or anything needed to make the notes clearer.
One thing that I recommend doing is to write all notes in your own words instead of just copying what you read. The reason is simple, summarizing a subject in your own words requires that you understand it, so if you can’t summarize, you haven’t understood (and won’t remember either). If that’s the case, just read again until you actually understand or seek for external help if needed. Another advantage of summarizing is that sometimes a whole paragraph (or more) will be used to explain something that can be said in one sentence.
3- Read the notes.
Now that you have completely read your book or whatever source of information it is, and that you’ve taken notes, all you have to do is read the notes you took. If you did it right, it should contain only useful, short and precise information. So if you need to study for a test, or just refresh your memory about this subject, you just have to read your notes and you’ll get all the information you need without having to read the whole book again. Your notes would normally cover the entire subject without the bloat.
Using a notebook isn’t essential, if you’re more of a computer person you can also use text files or other softwares. As long as you actually go through the three steps above, the container doesn’t make much difference as long as you’re able to understand the format. I personally use both notebooks and text files depending on context, but in my case it seems that writing by hand requires more cerebral activity than keyboard writing, making it more effective as a learning technique. When I say that handwriting requires “more cerebral activity”, I mean that writing words by hand makes my brain spend more time analyzing each word compared to writing on a keyboard where I sometimes write incoherent sentences without realizing it (requiring that I proofread what I write on this blog multiple times before posting).
The end
I think that this technique has two main benefits. The first one being that you initially go through the subject 3 times, you read it, you summarize it and then you write it down. So it’s almost as if you studied it three times in only one pass. The second one is that once you’ve got your notebook filled with notes, all you need to do is to read that notebook again to get all the useful information.