Prelude

Now this really was a book I wish I would have read earlier, maybe like 9 years ago when I went to High School. Robinson opens the art of effective studying, and how to maximize your grades, optimize your learning and minimise your time spent while doing it. This is a skill I’m certain everyone would like to have, but sometimes people block this without even trying. You can hear things like “I’m not smart enough” or “I don’t have a good memory” or “I am just not that talented.” Those reasons don’t matter with determination and right studying and memorizing techniques. Book offers twelve ways to think about the task at hand, and to me they were quite brilliant.

Studying and writing the answer based on questions

There are twelve questions you can ask yourself when answering to a question and writing an essay, and when you study for an exam. If you get an answer to every single of these twelve questions, the essay and your knowledge is pretty much guaranteed to be on top level. The questions to ask yourself are:

• What’s my purpose of reading this?
• What do I already know about this topic?
• What’s the big picture here?
• What’s the author going to say next?
• What are the expert questions?
• What questions does this information raise in me?
• What information is important here?
• How can I say and summarize this information?
• How can I picture this information?
• What’s my hook of remembering this information?
• How does this information fit in with what I already know?

Next step is to write up an answer to each of these questions asked above. When comparing all those written answers which are based on these questions, the student is able to create complex and many layered view concerning the topic at hand. Writing those up after asking yourself the question helps to memorize the answers. After each answer has been written, the student can still write a recap about all the answers, if necessary. Whole thing takes maximum 2 hours, and after it you’ll have a clear vision about the topic with different points of view.

This is so simple, and I am a bit sad I didn’t have this when I was studying to my finals at high school, but I think this is still usable in the future, if I go to study master’s degree and prepare for those exams there. I also think I’ll tell this to my athletes at some point as they are now in high school, this is certainly a useful way to study especially non science-based subjects like History, Health, Psychology, Philosophy and so on. With this model anyone can learn, but obviously it requires a bit of determination and patience that you can get those answers done properly. They won’t help, if they are done with left hand or in case you are left-handed with right hand. That twelve-question model for studying was the main thing I got from this book, an it will certainly be important at some point.