8
tricks for remembering everything you read
Don't let those words exit your brain the second they
enter.
Plenty of people admit to forgetting most of what they read, no matter how much they enjoyed the text.
Plenty of people admit to forgetting most of what they read, no matter how much they enjoyed the text.
But just because forgetting
is a human phenomenon doesn't mean you should simply accept it. In fact, there
are plenty of simple, creative strategies for retaining more of what you read —
whether that's novels, news articles, or scientific textbooks.
To find out what some of
those techniques are, we perused the Quora thread, "How do you remember what you've just
read?"
and scoured the web for advice from other readers.
Below are eight of the most
practical techniques .
1.
Take notes on the page.
"Never read without a
pencil," says Quora user Deniz
Ateş. "Underline sentences you find confusing, interesting, or important.
Draw lines along the side of important paragraphs. Draw diagrams to see the
structure of key ideas."
2. Ask yourself questions
about the material.
Ingrid Spielman recommends interacting with the
text by asking yourself questions as you go along.
If you're reading a
textbook, the question can be as
simple as,
"What is the main idea of this section?"
If you're reading
fiction, you can ask, "What are the
motives of the character?" and "If you could rewrite this reading,
what would your version be like?"
3.
Skim the text first.
An anonymous user cites an article by Bill Klemm, Ph.D.,
a professor of neuroscience, which highlights skimming as a key strategy for
retaining information.
The idea here isn't to skip
the whole reading process. Instead, you'll want to skim the text for important
topics and keywords beforehand so you know what to expect when
you actually dig into the material. Being familiar with the general themes,
Klemm says, will help you remember the particulars.
Make
associations between the information you're reading and facts you already
know.
4.
Impress, associate, repeat.
Stack Exchange
user TRdH says that memory is a
three-pronged process.
The first part is
impression. You can increase the strength of the impression the text makes on
you by picturing the situation in your mind or envisioning yourself
participating in the events described.
The second part is
association, or linking the material to something you already know. For
example, maybe one of the character's names sounds like your friend's
name.
The third part is
repetition. The more you read the material, the stronger your memory will be.
If you don't want to reread a whole book, try highlighting some parts of the
text that you can go back to.
5.
Introduce the information to others.
Experts say that, if you want
to remember what you experience, it's important to do something with
that information.
Two Quora users listed
talking about what you read as a useful means of processing new material.
Venkatesh Rao suggests blogging, or
otherwise trying to explain to others what you think you've learned.
Plus, if you find that you
can't explain it, you might want to go back and reread.
6.
Read out loud.
Another anonymous Quora
user says, "I actually have to
read out loud to myself most of the time to understand and remember what I just
read."
Writing in Psychology Today, psychologist Art Markman,
Ph.D., says this strategy might work best when there are a few key items you
need to remember. That's because the sentences you speak (or even whisper) out
loud take on a distinctiveness. You remember producing and hearing the items
and so your memory for them is different from the memory of the words you read
silently.
Research
suggests reading on Kindle, instead of on paper, hurts your ability to remember
a story's plot.
7.
Read on paper.
E-readers are convenient
tools for when you want to bring a ton of books on vacation and for downloading
stories in an instant.
But research suggests that they
could also undermine the strength of your memories. One study found that, when
people read the same short story in a paperback or on a Kindle, the paperback
readers were better able to remember the story's chronology.
Lead study author Anne
Mangen, Ph.D., says that's possibly because the piles of pages in your hands
creates a "tactile sense of progress" that you don't get from a
Kindle. (Of course, it's possible that people who are more accustomed to
reading online may not have this problem.)
Meanwhile, Mangen's
other research found that
high-school students performed better on a test of reading comprehension when
they read a text in print instead of on a computer screen.
8. Become familiar with the
topic first.
Blogger Ryan Battles recommends gaining some
background knowledge before you dive into a particular text.
"The more you
understand about a particular subject," he writes, "the more 'hooks'
keep the facts in there." Presumably, that's because you're able to make
more associations between the new information and what you already know.
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