If you’re preparing for an exam or just trying to learn more and improve your personal or professional skills, you have to struggle with a basic fact:
You ‘re not going to remember any about what you’ve read.
It’s a bit difficult, isn’t it? To know that you are reading to learn, but then you can only comprehend a portion of whatever you’re reading? That you’ve been doomed to miss a lot of valuable knowledge between the covers of the amazing book you ‘re going through?
There’s all sorts of tricks out there to make you read faster, but what about making you understand more of what you’re reading, so you can retain more of the information you ‘re feeding your brain?
Using a learning specialist named Scott H. Young’s “Question Book Process” you can do just that — measurably improving your ability to remember anything you’ve read.
Recognition vs. Recollection: know the difference.
Before jumping inside, it is vital to realize that there are two kinds of memory:
Recognition
Recollection
Recognition is being used to classify objects. It’s what you’re using when you see something you know (“cup,” “key,” “machine,” “words”). It helps us manage our everyday lives, without which we would be completely lost and confused.
Recall is what we’re using when we need to know the answer to something. It’s all about filling in blank — I need to take my machine to the guy that Jen suggested — what was their name? Or where did I leave the keys? It’s all about saving valuable information so that we all can bring it out when we really need it.
It is crucial to remember, since memory is not a single process, but is rather a set of different processes that function somewhat differently from one another to achieve one goal. By learning how each one works, you will use each one to improve your ability to remember more of the knowledge you’ve read.
So though understanding is what you use much of the time when you read a text — recognizing the sentences themselves or the ideas that the writer has used in the storyline or discussion — know that will most of all help you understand more of what you read.
This is where this simple technique comes in.
A simple trick to recall something that you’ve read
Remember how recalling encourages you pull up information whenever you need it, mostly to answer a query, or to fill in some of the details you need to perform a task? That’s the key to this trick. Go back and quiz yourself After you have finished the text and answered all the necessary questions for it, go back and quiz yourself on certain questions to further reinforce the knowledge in your nostalgic mind.
It is simple if you make sure that you leave a post-it note or something similar on the pages where you have taken notes and labelled the post-it issue so that you can easily come back to it later.
By framing the details that you would like to take from the book as a question, no matter what the text is, and then asking the information yourself, You ‘re going to be far more likely to “scan” the information so you can recall it in the future.
You obviously can’t do this with every bit of details in a novel. Nevertheless, it is very good for the most significant notes.
Usually, I end up with a page of notes on the typical non-fiction book I read, which is a decent amount of knowledge to do this exercise.
However, you can also do more if you use it for a school textbook or something similar, maybe having a page at each chapter as you pass through the book.
