How to read a professional book for slow learners

Hi everybody.

Today I want to talk to you about.. Well.. How to read a professional book for slow learners without too much waste of time.

Let us start at the. well. the beginning. How do you normally read a book if you want to memorize it properly. You read it once and then re read the whole thing again until it gets in your head? Or do you have another strategy?

Let me share you mine.

There are a few common practices that you can apply to better your chances of retaining the information that you get out of the pages you read.

Re-reading the right way

Re-reading is good. You definitely can apply that but do it the right way. As you read a chapter, define small chunks of paragraphs or entities or even the whole chapter for re-reading. That means. Read an entity fully. Don’t stop at what you don’t understand don’t bother with it right now just read it. You will get a general overview of what’s going on in that segment.

Once done, re-read the whole entity again, but this time pay attention to the details. This time look up what you don’t understand. Go with the flow and once you’re done go to the next section. This is not all however..

Note taking

As you go and re-read the entity you might want to consider that it is a good time for taking notes. Note taking is really something that you have to learn. Proper note taking that is. Notes that just repeat what ever is in the book or whatever you are reading currently is bad. That is just coping, that wont help you. You have to grasp the fundamentals. You have to take out what is important and forget the rest. You have to apply SMART objectives, little annotations, small sentences WITH YOUR OWN WORDS that will lead you to better understanding of the stuff that you are reading.

There are several methods that you can use for note taking, my favourite is Mind Mapping.

Writing up questions

One other very good practice is simply defining your own questions. Look at the title of a chapter, maybe a small summary of the chapter if that’s available. Try to define a set of questions that you want to get out of that chapter. Try to write down at least 3-4 questions that you think will be answered in that segment.

Read the segment. And now try to answer your Own questions without peaking. If you can’t you either have to write down some other questions because it wasn’t answered in that chapter. Or if it was answered but you still can’t answer it from the top of your head that means that you didn’t understood that chapter and that you have to re-read that part. If you can answer it, write it down so that it will stuck with you.

Linking information

Your brain is mostly associative. It works the best if it can link information to old information which is already in your head. Mind mapping helps with that. Mind mapping helps identifying old information segments in your brain. Try to find some common ground with the information you have to learn now and the one you already have. Unless your brain works differently you will better remember: “Two friends went to the lake fishing at night and they caught three fishes.”; then 23.

Conclusion

Generally speaking re-reading is a good practice but using it alone will sometimes not get you what you want. Re-reading the whole book isn’t going to help. Writing notes helps, but use your own wording, formatting, DON’T COPY!

I hope that help a bit to you guys out there who don’t have a photographic memory.

Cheers,

Gergely.