I have a confession to make, a rather difficult one for someone whose specialty is careers and education: To this very day, I resent having to write an outline for a book, article, or research project. I’d much rather just sit down and start writing.
I would have hated myself in school if I knew then what I know now: You should do outlines while you are reading as well. The fact is, outlines will help you review a text more quickly and remember it more clearly.
In Chapter 4, I advised using highlighters to, well, highlight important messages. This is great for a relatively easy-to-remember text. For other courses, it would be a sure sign of masochism, as it assures only one thing: You will have to read a great deal of your deadly textbooks all over again when exam time rolls around.
Likewise, marginalia usually make the most sense only in context, so the messy method of writing small notes in white space around the text will engender a great deal of rereading as well.
So then, what’s the most effective way to read and remember your textbooks? Sigh. Yes, that good old outline.
Outlining a textbook, article, or other secondary source is a little bit like “reverse engineering”—a way of developing a schematic for something so that you can see exactly how it has been put together. Seeing that logic of construction will help you a great deal in remembering the book—by putting the author’s points down in your words, you will be building a way to retrieve the key points of the book more easily from your memory.
Outlining will force you to distinguish the most important points from those of secondary importance, helping you build a true understanding of the topic.
Standard outlines use Roman numerals, (I, II, III), capital letters, Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3), lowercase letters (a, b, c), and indentations to show the relationships between and importance of topics in the text. While you certainly don’t have to use the Roman numeral system, your outline would be organized in the following manner:
First important topic in the text
First subtopic
First subtopic of A
First subtopic of 1
Second subtopic of 1
Second subtopic of A
The second important topic in the text
Get the idea? In a book, the Roman numerals usually would refer to chapters, the capital letters to subheadings, and the Arabic numbers and lowercase letters to blocks of paragraphs. In an article or single chapter, the Roman numerals would correspond to subheadings, capital letters to blocks of paragraphs, Arabic numbers to paragraphs, small letters to key sentences.
We understand things in outline form. Ask an intelligent person to recount something and he’ll state the main points and only enough details to make his words interesting and understandable. The discipline of creating outlines will help you zero in on the most important points an author is making and capture them, process them, and, thereby, retain them.
Sometimes an author will have the major point of a paragraph in the first sentence. But just as often, the main idea of a paragraph or section will follow some of these telltale words: therefore, because, thus, since, as a result.
When you see any of these words, you should identify the material they introduce as the major points in your outline. Material immediately preceding and following almost always will be in support of these major points.
I always found it frustrating to read textbooks in social studies. I’d go through chapters on France, England, the Far East, and have a fairly good understanding of those areas, but have no idea where certain events stood in a global context. As more and more colleges add multicultural curricula, you may find it even more difficult to “connect” events in 17th-century France or 19th-century Africa with what was happening in the rest of the world (let alone the U.S.).
An excellent tool for overcoming that difficulty is a timeline that you can update periodically. It will help you visualize the chronology and remember the relationship of key world events.
For instance, a simple, abridged timeline of James Joyce’s literary life would look like this (I would suggest you create a horizontal timeline, but the layout of this book makes reproducing it that way difficult. So here’s a vertical version):
1882 | Birth |
1907 | Chamber Music |
1914 | Dubliners |
1916 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
1918 | Exiles |
1922 | Ulysses |
1927 | Pomes Pennyeach |
1937 | Collected Poems |
1939 | Finnegan’s Wake |
1941 | Death |
This makes it easy to see that Joyce was born as the U.S. experienced a post-Civil War boom in industry and population growth and died during World War II. If you added other literary figures from the same period, you would not soon forget that Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, among many others, were all literary contemporaries. Adding nonliterary events to your timeline would enable you to make connections between what was being written and what was going on in the United States, Britain, Europe, Africa, and so forth.
Another terrific device for limiting the amount of verbiage in your notes and making them more memorable is the concept tree. Like a timeline, the concept tree is a visual representation of the relationships among several key facts. For instance, one might depict categories and specific types of animals in this way:
Such devices certainly give further credence to the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” because timelines and concept trees will be much more helpful than mere words in remembering material, particularly conceptual material. Developing them will ensure that your interest in the text will not flag too much.
But don’t limit yourself to these two types of “pictures.” Consider using a chart, graph, diagram, or anything else you can think of to reorganize any information for any class you’re taking (especially the sciences, history, or English).
The more extensive and difficult the information you need to understand, the more complex your pictorial summary may have to be. Rearranging information in this way will not only show connections you may have missed, but will also help you understand them better. It sure makes review easier!
Many questions on exams require students to define the terminology in a discipline. Your physics professor will want to know what vectors are, while your calculus teacher will want to know about differential equations. Your history professor will want you to be well-versed on the Cold War, and your English literature professor will require you to know about the Romantic Poets.
Therefore, as I read my textbooks, I wrote down new terms and definitions in my notes and drew little boxes around them. I knew these were among the most likely items to be asked about on tests, and that the boxes would always draw my attention to them when I was reviewing.
Most textbooks will provide definitions of key terms. If your textbook does not define a key term, however, make sure that you write the term down in your notes with its definition. Remember that your notes should reflect your individual understanding of the term. Take the time to rephrase and write it in your own words. This will help you remember it.
After you’ve finished making notes on a chapter, go through them and identify the most important points—the ones that might turn up on tests—either with an asterisk or by highlighting them. You’ll probably end up marking about 40 or 50 percent of your entries.
When you’re reviewing for a test, you should read all the notes, but your asterisks will indicate which points you considered the most important while the chapter was fresh in your mind.
To summarize, when it comes to taking notes from your texts or other reading material, you should:
Take a cursory look through the chapter before you begin reading. Look for subheads, highlighted terms, and summaries at the end of the chapter to give you a sense of the content.
Read each section thoroughly. While your review of the chapter “clues” will help you to understand the material, you should read for comprehension rather than speed.
Make notes immediately after you’ve finished reading, using the outline, timeline, concept tree, and vocabulary list methods of organization as necessary.
Mark with an asterisk or highlight the key points as you review your notes.