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Study Skills

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Submitted By bamagal
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The Decisions That Will Take You Forever Everyone has a way of studying no matter how it is done; even if its by sleeping, pulling an all nighter, or cramming right before the test, that’s studying. How you choose your proper study habits will impact you future for better or for worse. When studying, there are at least three categories that people fit into; 1) extremely successful people who usually study the text to be tested on at least 3 or 4 days before, 2) average people who study a day before, 3) last but not least, the crammers who study at least 2 minutes before administration of the test. Along with the three categories that people fall into, there are three ways of how to properly study so that you will start off successful and be that way for the rest of your life. The first most commonly used, highlighting, second, outlining the text, third, margin notes.
“Although often overlooked or relegated to a minor position in most study skills programs, appropriate in-text-highlighting skills is one of the cornerstones of all A+ students.”1 One of the ways to study fast and effectively, especially for crammers, is to simply highlight the text. This method is a very simple method, starting out by simply reading the text, then highlighting the main points. This will help you, when cramming, to easily pick out the stuff that you really need to know and eliminate all the other things that re not needed. There are downsides to this though, sometimes the text that you are highlighting is already compressed and summarized for you and you end up highlighting the whole thing. So highlighting is useful here and there but not every where.

Outlining is a very useful technique used by many but is time consuming compared to other types of note taking. “With this method, you can create a format for your notes by using numbers and letters to show both the relationship and relative importance among items of information. In mathematics, the concepts will often be your major points and the samples will be your minor points.”2 I myself use the outlining technique and study from it for all of my tests. This technique will benefit you in the long run by making sure that you take from the text the most important main ideas and put them on paper in a very organized format.

The third way to study successful is taking margin notes from the text. “When you study you want to remember more details to support the main ideas. Underline major points and make margin notes to highlight your observation.”3 Taking margin notes are very effective, only if you own your own text that you can write on, or if you want to annotate your notes even further. There are both pros and cons for taking margin notes.
The pros are; it is a easy and quick way to place notes near important text where your own annotation is and point out the important paragraphs from the text. A con is; after a while when you are taking too many margin notes, all the notes become jumbled up and you can no longer define where or what your notes are for which paragraph. Also if you are using margin notes for a presentation, it becomes messy and you cannot find out the main ideas and you start to loose the emphasis that was previously wanted to be presented. In conclusion, the outlining method of note taking is the best way to take notes, while using all the other methods along with it. The outlining method is extremely useful because everything is already cut out and is presented in an organized manner. Every body has a different manner of how to take notes and I hope this paper will be used as a guide for your decisions that will affect the rest of your life.

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