If it weren’t for the fact that reading is the absolute underpinning of every other study skill, I could make a pretty strong case that spending time improving your memory would deliver the most “study bang” for the buck. It doesn’t matter how rapidly you whiz through your textbooks if you can’t even remember the subject you just studied five minutes later. Getting organized is essential, but not too effective if you always forget to carry your calendar and regularly turn in homework assignments late. And, of course, spending hours searching high and low for keys, glasses, and other essentials isn’t exactly the most efficient way to start your study day.
As important as they are, basic memory techniques are the study ingredients least likely to be taught in schools, even in a study skills course. So while the better schools and teachers might help you with reading, writing, organizing, and test strategies, far too many of them will “forget” to help you with your memory...or to find your glasses, keys, etc.
This small book will give you so many easy ways to remember more, you’ll wonder why you didn’t become a “memorist” years ago.
I am proud that I have been helping students of all ages improve their study skills ever since the day I walked into a bookstore and realized there was no single book then available that simply taught someone how to study! This year marks another major milestone in the more than 20-year-long evolution of my How to Study Program—the reissuance of new editions of all the volumes in the series: How to Study, Improve Your Memory, Improve Your Reading, Improve Your Writing, Ace Any Test, and Get Organized.
My readers are far more varied than I ever expected. A number of you are students, not just the high school students I always thought were my readers, but also college students, who are making up for study skills you missed in high school, and junior high school students, who are trying to master these study skills early in your school career to maximize your opportunities for success.
Some readers are adults returning to school who have figured out that if you can learn now what your teachers never taught you the first time around, you will do better in your careers. Wouldn’t it be great to recall without notes the key points you want to make in your presentation, or remember the names of all the potential new clients you just met at a cocktail party?
All too many of you are parents with the same lament: “How do I get Jill to do better in school? She can’t remember my birthday, let alone when her next trigonometry test is.”
If you are still in high school, you will have no problem with the language and format of this book—its relatively short sentences and paragraphs, humorous (hopefully) headings and subheadings, and reasonable but certainly not outrageous vocabulary. I wrote it with you in mind!
If you are still in middle school, you are trying to learn how to study at precisely the right time. Sixth, seventh, and eighth grades—before that sometimes-cosmic leap to high school—are without a doubt when all these study skills should be mastered. If you’re serious enough about studying to be reading this book, I doubt you’ll have trouble with the concepts or the language.
A traditional college student (aged 18 to 25 or so) will have trouble making it to graduation without having learned all of the study techniques I cover, especially basic memory techniques. If you never found the time to learn them (and even if you know some tips but not every trick and gimmick covered in this book), I guarantee that truly mastering these memory techniques will help you long after you graduate (with As, of course!).
Parents reading this book are probably worried about their kid’s grades, and they do have something to worry about—their child’s school probably spends little, if any, time teaching basic study skills, which means those kids are not learning how to learn. And that means they are not learning how to succeed.
Don’t for a minute underestimate the importance of your commitment to your child’s success: Your involvement in your child’s education is absolutely essential to his or her eventual success.
And you can help tremendously, even if you were not a great student yourself, even if you never learned great study skills. You can learn now with your child—not only will it help him or her in school, it will help you on the job, whatever your field.
The books in the How to Study Program, are meant to address all of these readers and their common problem—learning how to study so they can do better in school, or helping their kids to do so.
There are probably even more dedicated parents out there than dedicated students, since the first phone call at any of my radio or TV appearances comes from a sincere and worried parent asking, “What can I do to help my child do better in school?” Okay, here they are, the rules for parents of students of any age:
Set up a homework area. Free of distraction, well lit, with all necessary supplies handy.
Set up a homework routine. When and where it gets done. Studies have clearly shown that students who establish a regular routine are better organized and, as a result, more successful.
Set homework priorities. Actually, just make the point that homework is the priority—before a date, before TV, before going out to play, whatever.
Make reading a habit—for them, certainly, but also for you. Kids will inevitably do what you do, not what you say (even if you say not to do what you do).
Turn off the TV. Or at the very least, severely limit when and how much TV watching is appropriate. This may be the toughest suggestion to enforce. I know. I was once the parent of a teenager.
Talk to the teachers. Find out what your kids are supposed to be learning. If you don’t know the books they’re supposed to be reading, what’s expected of them in class, and how much homework they should be scheduling, you can’t really give them the help they need.
Encourage and motivate, but don’t nag them to do their homework. It doesn’t work. The more you insist, the quicker they will tune you out.
Supervise their work, but don’t fall into the trap of doing their homework. Checking (i.e., proofreading) a paper, for example, is a positive way to help your child in school. But if you simply put in corrections without your child learning from her mistakes, you’re not helping her at all...except in the belief that she is not responsible for her own work.
Praise them when they succeed, but don’t overpraise them for mediocre work. Kids know when you’re being insincere and, again, will quickly tune you out.
Convince them of reality. (This is for older students.) Okay, I’ll admit it’s almost as much of a stretch as turning off the TV, but learning and believing that the real world will not care about their grades, but will measure them by what they know and what they can do, is a lesson that will save many tears (probably yours). It’s probably never too early to (carefully) let your boy or girl genius get the message that life is not fair.
If you can afford it, get your kid(s) a computer and all the software they can handle. There really is no avoiding it: Your kids, whatever their ages, absolutely must be computer-savvy in order to survive in and after school.
Turn off the TV already!
Get wired. The Internet is the greatest invention of our age and an unbelievable tool for students of any age. It is impossible for a student to succeed without the ability to surf online in this age of technology. They’ve got to be connected.
But turn off IM (Instant Messaging) while doing homework. They will attempt to convince you that they can write a term paper, do their geometry homework, and IM their friends at the same time. Parents who believe this have also been persuaded that the best study area is in front of the TV.
If you’re going back to high school, college, or graduate school at age 25, 45, 65, or 85—you probably need the help my books offer more than anyone! Why? Because the longer you’ve been out of school, the more likely it is that you don’t remember what you’ve forgotten. And you’ve probably forgotten what you’re supposed to remember! As much as I emphasize that it’s rarely too early to learn good study habits, I must also emphasize that it’s never too late.
If you’re returning to school and attempting to carry even a partial load of courses while simultaneously holding down a job, raising a family, or both, there are some particular problems you face that you probably didn’t the first time you were in school:
Time and money pressures. When all you had to worry about was going to school, it was easier than going to school, raising a family, and working for a living simultaneously! Your organizational and memory skills will be tested daily.
Self-imposed fears of inadequacy. You may well convince yourself that you’re just “out of practice” with all this school stuff. You don’t even remember what to do with a highlighter! While some of this fear is valid, most is not. The valid part is that you are returning to an academic atmosphere, one that you may not have visited for a decade or two. And it is different (which I’ll discuss more next) than the “work-a-day” world. That’s just a matter of adjustment and—trust me—it will take a matter of days, if not hours, to dissipate. I suspect what many of you are really fearing is that you just aren’t in that school “mentality” anymore, that you don’t “think” the same way. Or, perhaps more pertinent to this book, that the skills you need to succeed in school are rusty.
I think these last fears are groundless. You’ve been out there thinking and doing for quite a few years, perhaps very successfully, so it’s really ridiculous to think school will be so different. It won’t be. Relax. And while you may think your study skills are rusty, as we discussed earlier, you’ve probably been using them every day in your career. Even if I can’t convince you, you have my How to Study Program as your refresher course. It will probably teach you more about studying than you ever forgot you knew.
Maybe you’re worried because you didn’t exactly light up the academic world the first time around. Well, neither did Edison or Einstein or a host of other successful people. But then, you’ve changed rather significantly since then, haven’t you? Concentrate on how much more qualified you are for school now than you were then!
Feeling you’re “out of your element.”. This is a slightly different fear, the fear that you just don’t fit in anymore. After all, you’re not 18 again. But then, neither are fully half the college students on campuses today. That’s right: Fully 50 percent of all college students are older than 25. The reality is, you’ll probably feel more in your element now than you did the first time around!
You’ll see teachers differently. Probably a plus. It’s doubtful you’ll have the same awe you did the first time around. At worst, you’ll consider teachers your equals. At best, you’ll consider them younger and not necessarily as successful or experienced as you are. In either event, you probably won’t be quite as ready to treat your college professors as if they were minor deities.
There are differences in academic life. It’s slower than the “real” world, and you may well be moving significantly faster than its normal pace. When you were 18, an afternoon without classes meant a game of Frisbee. Now it might mean catching up on a week’s worth of errands, cooking (and freezing) a week’s worth of dinners, and/or writing four reports due this week. Despite your own hectic schedule, do not expect campus life to accelerate in response. You will have to get used to people and systems with far less interest in speed.
Learning shouldn’t be painful and certainly doesn’t have to be boring, though it’s far too often both. It’s not necessarily going to be painless, either. Sometimes you actually have to work hard to figure something out or get a project done. That is reality.
It’s also reality that everything isn’t readily apparent or easily understandable. Learning something slowly doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It may be a subject that virtually everybody learns slowly.
A good student doesn’t panic when something doesn’t seem to be getting through the haze. He just takes his time, follows whatever steps apply, and remains confident that the lightbulb will indeed inevitably go on.
Parents often ask me, “How can I motivate my teenager?” My initial response is usually to say, “If I knew the answer to that question, I would have retired very wealthy quite some time ago.” However, I think there is an answer, but it’s not something parents can do—it’s something the student has to decide: Are you going to spend the school day interested and alert or bored and resentful?
It’s really that simple. Since you have to go to school anyway, why not develop the attitude that you might as well be active and learn as much as possible instead of being miserable? The difference between a C and an A or B for many students is, I firmly believe, merely a matter of wanting to do better. As I constantly stress in radio and TV interviews, inevitably you will leave school. And very quickly, you’ll discover the premium is on what you know and what you can do. Grades won’t count anymore, and neither will tests. So you can learn it all now or regret it later.
How many times have you said to yourself, “I don’t know why I’m bothering trying to learn this calculus, algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, history, whatever. I’ll never use this again!”? Unless you’ve got a patent on some great new fortune-telling device, you have no clue what you’re going to need to know tomorrow or next week, let alone next year or in a decade.
I’ve been amazed in my own life how things I did with no specific purpose in mind (except probably to earn money or meet a girl) turned out years later to be not just invaluable to my life or career, but essential. How was I to know when I took German as my language elective in high school that the most important international trade show in book publishing was in Frankfurt, Germany? Or that the basic skills I learned one year working for an accountant (while I was writing my first book) would become essential when I later started four companies?
Or how important basic math skills would be in selling and negotiating over the years? (Okay, I’ll admit it: I haven’t used a differential equation in 30 years, but, hey, you never know!)
So learn it all. And don’t be surprised if the subject you’d vote “least likely to ever be useful” winds up being the key to your fame and fortune.
Though I immodestly maintain that my How to Study Program is the most helpful to the most people, there are certainly plenty of other purported study books out there. Inevitably, these books promote the authors’ “system,” which usually means what they did to get through school. This “system,” whether basic and traditional or wildly quirky, may or may not work for you. So what do you do if “their” way of taking notes makes no sense to you? Or you master their highfalutin’ “Super Student Study Symbols” and still get Cs?
There are very few “rights” and “wrongs” out there in the study world. There’s certainly no single “right” way to attack a multiple choice test or take notes. So don’t get fooled into thinking there is, especially if what you’re doing seems to be working for you.
Needless to say, don’t read my books looking for some single, inestimable system of “rules” that works for everyone. You won’t find it, ’cause there’s no such bird.
You will find a plethora of techniques, tips, tricks, gimmicks, and what-have-you, some or all of which may work for you, some of which won’t. Pick and choose, change and adapt, figure out what works for you. Because you are the one responsible for creating your study system, not me.
I’ve used the phrase “Study smarter, not harder” as a sort of catch phrase in promotion and publicity for the How to Study Program for 20 years. So what does it mean to you? Does it mean I guarantee you’ll spend less time studying? Or that the less studying you do, the better your grades will be? Or that studying isn’t ever supposed to be difficult?
Hardly. It means that studying inefficiently is wasting time that could be spent doing other (okay, probably more fun) things and that getting your studying done as quickly and efficiently as possible is a realistic, worthy, and attainable goal. I’m no stranger to hard work, but I’m not a monastic dropout who thrives on self-flagellation. I try not to work harder than I have to!
If you have trouble remembering your own phone number, this is the book for you. This new edition is even more complete—a simple, practical, easy-to-use memory book that will help you:
Remember numbers.
Remember dates and facts.
Retain more of what you read the first time you read it.
Take notes that will help you score well on tests.
Remember numbers.
Build a bigger vocabulary.
Remember how to spell.
Remember names and faces.
Remember numbers. (And yes, I'm repeating this for emphasis because I get the feeling this is everyone’s biggest problem!)
What’s more, Improve Your Memory will help you do all of this without investing a mind-numbing amount of time and effort. Its advice is easy to learn and even easier to apply.
Along the way, you might even develop the skills for knowing at all times where you’ve left your glasses, car keys, or wallet.
The best way to approach this book is to read Chapters 1 through 9 straight through, then go back and review some of the mechanics of memory improvement contained in Chapters 3 through 9. If you have ADD—or are the parent of someone who does—be sure to read Chapter 10.
After this review, take the tests in Chapter 11 and see how much you’ve improved your memory. I’m sure you’ll be amazed. When you’ve finished this book, you’ll be effortlessly flexing mental muscles you never knew you had!
Before we get on with all the tips and techniques necessary to remember anything you need to, when you need to, let me make two important points about all my study books.
First, while I believe in gender equality, I find constructions such as “he and she,” “s/he,” “womyn,” and other such stretches to be sometimes painfully awkward. I have therefore attempted to sprinkle pronouns of both genders throughout the text.
Second, you will find that many similar pieces of advice, examples, lists, phrases, and sections appear in several of my books. Certainly How to Study, which is an overview of all the study skills, necessarily contains, though in summarized form, some of each of the other five books.
The repetition is unavoidable. While I urge everyone to read all the books in the series, but especially How to Study, they are six individual books. And many people buy only one of them. Consequently, I must include in each book the pertinent material for that topic, even if that material is repeated in another book.
That said, I can guarantee that the nearly 1,000 pages of my How to Study Program contain the most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and complete system of studying ever published. I have attempted to create a system that is usable, useful, practical, and learnable. One that you can use—whatever your age, whatever your level of achievement, whatever your IQ—to start doing better in school, in work, and in life immediately.
Good luck.
Ron Fry