Study advice

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Study advice

I came across a typical self-help article by Scott Young on the Pick the Brain blog. I sometimes look into study advice because of the enormous amount of studying I have been doing recently for a project. At 55, it is not so easy to cram new facts into this noggin as it used to be, so I am always on the lookout for tips.

12 Tips to Improve Your Study Habits Next Term

As I read through this list, my mind started going into that comfort zone where I had heard all this before and life was drifting by. Then came a curveball:

9. Read Papers Upside Down. A good editing habit when checking over your essays and assignments is to read them upside down. This prevents you from speed reading the page and missing grammatical or sentence structure errors. This also gives you a better feeling of how an essay might be read through fresh eyes, letting you improve your style.

Hmmmm... I never heard that one before. I might try that. Then I continued and came to the following.

11. Seek Your Professors. A great tip from Tim Ferriss in the 4-Hour Workweek involves what to do if you get a bad mark on a paper. He recommends meeting your professor during office hours and asking for suggestions for improvement. Tim recommends that you exhaust every possible question, staying for an hour or two if you have to. By doing this you will not only have a wealth of information about how papers are marked, but your professor will also hesitate to give you a lousy mark in the future.

I burst out laughing. Hey Mr. Scott Young! What's that item doing in your list? I don't want to fake it! I want to learn!

But that item sure does sound like me in my younger days.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

9. Read Papers Upside Down. A good editing habit when checking over your essays and assignments is to read them upside down. This prevents you from speed reading the page and missing grammatical or sentence structure errors. This also gives you a better feeling of how an essay might be read through fresh eyes, letting you improve your style.

Hmmmm... I never heard that one before. I might try that. Then I continued and came to the following.

Doubtful advice... Too much effort and too slow, I think. By trying to decipher the text you've no time to concentrate on the sentence structure. My experience is that for eliminating errors in the text the best way is to let other people read it. The problem is that you yourself know what you want to say and the brain automatically corrects errors in the text when you read it. I let my wife read my translations first, before I send them to the editor. Although she often has no idea what the text is about, she always finds errors that I'd overlooked, and also points out sentences that are grammatically difficult to understand, so that I can correct the text and improve the clumsy sentences by rewriting them.

On the other hand I found it a good tactic when I work on a painting to put it sometimes upside down on the easel. Errors (for example in perspective) that I didn't see at first, suddenly stand out. Another tactic is looking at the painting in a mirror.

[BAMF]

Thanks for these, Michael. I'm going to be starting school again soon and am hoping to straighten myself up this semester. I really need to start some good habits so that I can do well.

Reading it upside down is an interesting method, but I think I can read just about as fast a normal even when it's upside down.

Having someone else read it is definitely a good idea, because of course everything in your paper makes sense to you...you wrote it! Also, I've found that you really need to write papers in advance so that you can put them down for a while and reread them later. If you get it out of your mind for a while and then reread you will see a lot of errors you missed. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten this one down just yet. I'm the all-nighter queen.

[CNA]

Kori, I'm so glad to hear that you're starting school again. I know it's been a long time no talk but you know how that is. It's interesting that I've never heard of reading something upside down and agree with DF that it would become too time consuming in deciphering and understanding what is being said and would overlook many errors. But I will say that in my profession of being a court reporter and producing manuscripts and transcripts it seems every waking moment of my life as of late that reading the manuscripts and transcripts from end to beginning works extremely well in catching many errors. Being self employed and at my production rate sometimes, I've hired proof readers with not so great results because what they see as an error in the work product is actually incorrect because a comma or what have you will greatly change the meaning of the sentence. Also they were not present when it was done. S although inflections in the voice and emotion is sometimes difficult to convey, it very much dictates how a sentence is worded and what punctuation to use in order to record it accurately. I found also that putting it down and working on something else and then going back to it with a fresh mind for that particular material is easier to catch errors as well as reading the material backwards. You also catch many spelling errors this way. Of course, if you're not working on a computer or what have you at that time, it works well for spelling errors; say for instance, a draft that you printed out and take with you somewhere and don't have the luxury of a spell checker.

Anyway, Kori, I hope it helps and I'm very very happy to hear you're back in school. What are you studying this time? Architecture still?

Edited January 8, 2008 by CNA

[Alfonso Jones]

Study advice

I came across a typical self-help article by Scott Young on the Pick the Brain blog. I sometimes look into study advice because of the enormous amount of studying I have been doing recently for a project. At 55, it is not so easy to cram new facts into this noggin as it used to be, so I am always on the lookout for tips.

12 Tips to Improve Your Study Habits Next Term

As I read through this list, my mind started going into that comfort zone where I had heard all this before and life was drifting by. Then came a curveball:

9. Read Papers Upside Down. A good editing habit when checking over your essays and assignments is to read them upside down. This prevents you from speed reading the page and missing grammatical or sentence structure errors. This also gives you a better feeling of how an essay might be read through fresh eyes, letting you improve your style.

Hmmmm... I never heard that one before. I might try that. Then I continued and came to the following.

11. Seek Your Professors. A great tip from Tim Ferriss in the 4-Hour Workweek involves what to do if you get a bad mark on a paper. He recommends meeting your professor during office hours and asking for suggestions for improvement. Tim recommends that you exhaust every possible question, staying for an hour or two if you have to. By doing this you will not only have a wealth of information about how papers are marked, but your professor will also hesitate to give you a lousy mark in the future.

I burst out laughing. Hey Mr. Scott Young! What's that item doing in your list? I don't want to fake it! I want to learn!

But that item sure does sound like me in my younger days.

Michael

Speaking as a professor (and having been a professor for 25 of the last 29 years - a brief excursion into industry accounting for the other four years) --- I would not predict much success with such a strategy.

If you apply the strategy once, expect:

1) To find it hard to get a convenient appointment time to meet with the professor in the future.

2) To find that you are scheduled in the future 15 minutes before someone else... "Well, that's all for now. My next appointment is here."

3) To find that on your next visit you end up getting to answer all the questions

4) Being asked about your own judgment when you ask for suggestions for improvement. Being asked to review your paper (on your own, not in the prof's office), looking at the marks and comments on it, and come back with a proposed improved draft so that the discussion can be made more specific.

as well as many other tactics which I'm not going to document . . . they are very useful!

Most experienced profs can distinguish between someone who is seriously trying to learn and someone playing games (such as trying to get more points on the exam/paper, etc...) in a few seconds.

Alfonso