From Revision tips and techniques to a Real Skill
by Alan Pritt
However, most people do it badly; causing themselves untold anguish and little in the way of long term benefits.
Below, we are going to venture beyond simple revison tips and techniques, and towards a real skill. A skill that will form the basis from which you can memorise anything you desire.
From tips and techniques to a real skill
In researching this article, I stumbled upon countless websites that offered lists of one-line tips and techniques for revision. Most of this advice was good, but it struck me how unlikely it is that anyone would be able to put it all into practice. Although all the tips seem simple, the difficulty is in incorporating them into what you do. They simply don't offer enough detail to help you really put the suggestion into practice.
If you read my newsletter, it's obvious that I like tips and techniques, and so I actually think these sites are a good idea. While you're unlikely to make drastic changes, you may pick one or two of the revision tips and be able to incoporate it into what you do. However, I'm interested in taking you to a level much higher than that. If you want to see big improvements, a slightly different approach is required. My revision 'tips and techniques', therefore, go into greater detail and are more long-term in approach. The usual advice will tell you how to revise inefficiently but in the short term. I'm going to teach you a real skill that will get you long term results and plenty of them.
What I won't be teaching you is cramming. Cramming is actually what most of those revision tips and techniques websites teach, and in my opinion this is not really revision. These websites assume you won't have learnt well enough early on, and that you will basically be playing catch up. I refuse to make that assumption because if you want maximum results, playing catch-up is not an option.
If it's not easy, it's not revision
I used to think revision was difficult and a real chore. This myth is based on a misunderstanding of what revision is.
Proper revision is easy because you've already learnt what you are covering. Revision is just a refresher. Or at least it should be.
The easiest, most natural, approach is to think in the short term. Mostly we try to do as little work as possible in order to receive short term successes. Therefore, in the short term, we may for example only learn 90% of the material. In the short term this is enough to get by and actually be quite successful, but it is not a good long-term approach.
The problem is that the remaining 10% usually contains something important and by missing it out you slow down any future progress. If you built a house with its foundations only 90% complete, you would be living in constant fear of it falling down; the same is true for learning. Just because you run out of time or it seems too difficult or boring, is no excuse. If you don't learn that last 10%, everything else you learn in that subject will be that much more difficult. Invest the time and effort to learn that extra 10% and everything will be much easier. Steve Pavlina's comments on this are worth repeating:
If you don’t understand something you were taught in class today, treat it as a bug that must be fixed ASAP. Do not put it off. Do not pile new material on top of it. If you don’t understand a word, a concept, or a lesson, then drop everything and do whatever it takes to learn it before you continue on. Ask questions in class, get a fellow student to explain it to you, read and re-read the textbook, and/or visit the professor during office hours, but learn it no matter what.
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During each semester ask yourself this question: Am I ready to be tested right now on everything that has been taught up to this point? If your answer is ever “no,” then you know you’re falling behind, and you need to catch up immediately. Ideally you should be able to answer “yes” to this question at least once a week for every subject.
Falling behind even a little is an enormous stressor and time waster. First, you have to go back and re-learn the old material when the rest of the class has already moved on. Secondly, you may not learn the new material as well if it builds on the old material because you lack a solid foundation, so you just end up falling further and further behind. Then when you come to the end of the semester, you end up having to re-learn everything you were supposed to learn. But because you cram at the last minute, after finals you forget everything anyway. What’s the point of that silliness?
Furthermore, as we tend to put off more difficult work, you quickly begin to develop a backlog of things you need to learn that are personally difficult for you. This is why revision usually seems hard and tiresome. You will be spending the majority of your revision time trying to learn the most difficult parts of the course. No wonder revision seems like a chore. When you do this right, revision is incredibly easy because you are just going over what you already know.
If you're going to do revision properly, you have to set the stage by learning the material in the first place. There are many, many ways to help you understand and memorise new material easily, but you will have to look elsewhere on this website for that.
However, it is imperative that you appreciate how important this stage is. As was mentioned above, if you don't learn the early stuff well, the new stuff will be even more difficult. Be patient. Don't build knowledge on unstable foundations.
Once you've learnt the material properly, you need to make sure you never forget it again. This is where revision comes in.
Revision IS the Test
Good notes are not overly detailed. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Your notes should be as brief as possible. They should have just enough detail to remind you of everything you have learnt and no more. Striking the balance between too much and too little detail in your notes is a fine art. It's one of the reasons why revision is a skill. You have to become very aware of what you are likely to remember, for how long, and what cues you need to write down to remind you.
The aim of revision isn't to relearn what you have already learnt. When you learn something new for the first time, connections are made between neurons in your brain. When you revise you are not building new connections, but actually reinforcing the connections you have already made. This reinforcement is done simply by remembering what you have previously learnt.
To make sure you are really remembering what is already there, your notes should contain just enough information to cue the memory. This may consist of a trigger word, or even a question.
To make sure you are doing this correctly, rather than writing notes that will teach you something, write notes that will test you. Much advice on revision suggests that you give yourself regular tests for revision; I believe all revision should be a test. My notes are completely useless to anyone but me. They don't teach me anything new, they just force me to access what I've already learnt. These days most of my notes consist of questions. Sometimes I'll write out a question explicitly, other times I'll save time by implying a question with a couple of key words, but everything is a question that I must answer when I revise.
In practice you may not always want to write notes in this fashion. If you're short on time or you are worried you won't remember something and don't have a reference for it, start by making more detailed notes. Then once you have these detailed notes, you can then write a second set which you will actually use for revision. The first set of notes is a back up, and as you get better at revision you will use that backup less and less.
An example scenario where this would be the case, would be during a lecture where you have limited time to memorise all the information. If you tried to memorise each new fact during a lecture you would likely find you miss half of what is said. In this situation I would write a first set of notes that contained the details I didn't think I would be able to memorise. After the lecture I would then memorise this information properly and write up a second set of notes. This second set of notes would be much more like a test, and I would use this for revision.
This is the kind of subtle thing you need to learn to react to. What can you memorise now, what will you take the time to memorise later, and what won't you memorise at all?
You may also like to experiment with Mind Maps which work along similar principles; although don't take it to as far an extreme as I have.
As well as being a brilliant method for revising, tests also help improve your ability to learn in the first place. It will set up a feedback loop that will help you develop your judgement of learning, and this will help you learn better in the future. When you first start to do this kind of revision, you will likely find that many of the things you thought you'd learnt well, were not learnt properly at all. In my experience this can be quite a harsh lesson, but ultimately very rewarding.
Real World
Try to make your revision as real world as possible. Where possible try testing yourself in real situations. The real world is the only test that really matters, so that's the one you want to make sure you can pass.
While it is a good idea to dive in and put your learning to immediate use, that's not always possible. Real world use is brilliant, but it's not always the most efficient method. Say you are learning a new language, and you have just learnt the vocabulary for describing people (words like eye, hair, tall, pretty, short). In this case, it is unlikely you will naturally get into a conversation where you use all of this new vocabulary. Therefore, you need to work out an artificial scenario where you can practice these words.
The most obvious artificial scenario is a written test, but there are many more enjoyable and creative ways to test yourself. I won't go into more details here, but I just wanted to plant it as an idea so you can start to come up with some creative ideas.
Timing
Timing the when of your revision is another skill you need to master. All I can provide are a few broad key points; the rest, you will have to work out through experimentation.
The difficulty in giving you specific advice is that the timing differs depending on what you are learning, as well as how good you are at learning it. These factors change the timing considerably, so there is no real way of teaching it other than to tell you to experiment.
For example, say you are trying to memorise a new telephone number. You use simple repetition to learn the number. This may involve repeating the number to your self every minute for about 10 minutes, then after half an hour, then after a couple of hours, then just before going to bed, and again the next morning.
Now imagine you had learnt some of the memory systems discussed in my eBook. You use one of these systems to memorise another telephone number. This time you find you only need to repeat the information to yourself once after 10 minutes and a second time the next morning, before the information sticks.
To begin with, I suggest you over revise. Yes, you will be using a lot of time revising that you don't really need; but this will help you understand how frequently you need to revise a topic. It's also easier to cut down your revision than it is to increase it. In fact, as you become better at this, the amount of revision time you need begins to reduce considerably. And this starts to happen pretty quickly.
So, having made it clear that you need to dive in and experiment, here is a good starting point...
First of all it is recommended that you revise ten minutes after the initial learning. So study, take a ten minute break and then come back and quickly revise it. Ideally you should then take another 10 minute break followed by another quick revision. This should make the new connections in your brain really strong.
After that, generally you should revise again the following day. I recommend having a set time to do this and to get in the habit of doing it every single day. Since you should really learn something every day, there should always be something for you to revise. This may only take 5 minutes, but it will help develop the habit of continuingly improving your knowledge. If you don't have any actual notes, go back over the previous day and try to recall what happened and what you learnt.
After a week, revise again, making sure the revision really is a test. If you struggle over anything in the test, now is the time to go back and correct it. Either decide that it is unimportant and that you will never bother to learn it, or stop everything now and focus all your energy on learning it well.
If you test yourself at any point and find you cannot remember what you learnt, the best course of action is to revise it earlier in the future. So imagine you were memorising all the American states. You get to a stage where you know them by heart, but then find out a week later that you've forgotten half of them. Next time you learn something similar, you should add another revision session between the time you had them memorised and the time you forgot. With enough repetition you can memorise anything, so this is the surest method. Only after you've mastered revision do I advice learning more advanced memory techniques to reduce the number of revisions you need.
Patience and Discipline
Although in the long term following the above advice will get you the most reward for time invested, it requires patience and discipline. Ironically, those who have the least patience will actually experience the slowest progress.
You know the people who decide to go on diets around spring time to ready themselves for the beach? How many of those people actually manage to get the body they want by summer? The answer is few. Getting your body in shape takes knowledge and time. Short-term thinking, usually brings disappointment. When summer suddenly arrives, they realise they left it too late. Rather than get depressed, smart people start focusing on the next summer.
Many (most?) people leave revision too late as well. The later you leave it, the worse your results will be. If the only lesson you learn is that you must spread your work out through the year, it will be a very well spent year. If you don't learn it, you will have wasted this year.
But how do you make yourself disciplined enough to take advantage of great revision? The answer is to make it a habit.
Make it a daily habit
If you are one of those people who tend to cram their revision but have decided to change, my best recommendation would be to start developing the habit of revision the first day after your exam, performance or whatever you are revising for.
This is probably the most unlikely time for you to ever revise, but it is also the best day to begin a habit. At this time you will probably be just about getting the hang of revision, having been forced to do it during your cramming period. Since it is the least likely time for you to begin revision, it also means it is more likely to stick during the more likely times. Also, if you fail, there is still plenty of time to pick up and try to develop it as a habit again.
Since this is a stress free time, it also allows you to take it easy in the beginning stages. At this stage it is more important to develop it as a habit than it is to even learn anything. This means you can concentrate simply on doing it for 5 or 10 minutes every day.
When you've decided to make this a daily habit read my article on developing habits to get started.
It takes a while for it to sink in
If it's too late to really do well now, print this out and put it somewhere where you will notice it after your exams. Even if you do well, you could have got there much more easily and with better results had you been more disciplined throughout the year. Let this be a harsh lesson, and learn for the future.
If you are ambitious enough, decide to step beyond simple revision tips and techniques and become a master of your learning. Trust me on this, it will be one of the most beneficial things you ever do.
