ways to improve learning, retention and understanding while reading

Last updated Dec 17, 2022

• Always read with a pen (or keyboard) in hand. The end goal is to create permanent notes in the slipbox
• Elaborate in your own words what you have understood from reading
  • Make it as detailed as it needs to be
    • Technical texts can be very detailed
    • Self help books can be reduced to a sentence
  • Teach the subject to your future self
    • Include sufficient detail that it will make sense later
• Test your self on the material and think beyond the text
  • Elaboration is a way of testing your understanding
  • Identify how it connects to what you already know
• Practice extracting the gist from reading something
  • Be it a paragraph, section or chapter, step back and ask yourself what was just explained to you
  • Ask what is not being said too
  • Don’t hear the author’s voice in your head; learn to think as you read and develop your own inner voice
• Capture all information from what you read, and not just what you agree with
• Create abstractions from what you read to a context that is more general than the one you encountered an idea in.

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