Occasionally, thinking people pause to ask themselves why they forget
almost everything they read. The answer is simple. Personal reading is
95% relaxation.
You find a quiet spot, you open the book, and you’re gone, safe in a
sanctuary. The river of time eddies around you, barely rocking the
boat. Bliss.
Now perhaps you’ve decided that, nice as that is, it might be also
nice to hold on to a few of those life-changing facts once in awhile.
However, you still like reading, and the last thing you want is to
lurch for a keyboard every five minutes.
If you’re studying, it’s different. Entering flashcards becomes a
break. You read a bit, make some flashcards, and keep reading.
But for personal reading, you often want to read the whole book
without braking for annoying tasks like flashcards, sleep, or
breathing. So, here’s the key: mark the important points as you
read. Don’t stop to make cards. When you finish the book, go back
and use your marks to make cards.
ANNOYING DISCLAIMER: The following tips are mostly the result of
my own experimentation. If you find a better way, let me know. I
hope to find better ways myself. Side effects may include: improved
retention, increased tendency to quotation, and insufferable
fact-slinging at parties.
Tools of the memory trade:
- pencils
- small pads of sticky notes
- book stand (use when entering flashcards)
Distribute a pencil and pad combo throughout the house, wherever you
read. Once you open that book, if they’re not within reaching
distance, you’re about as likely to fetch them as to pop up and get a
cavity filled.
Mark the important points as you read
You don’t need to highlight or to underline important phrases.
Simply mark important points with a quick dash in the outside
margin. If a point spans multiple lines, you can make a vertical
line instead. This is quick and easy. It doesn’t disrupt the flow of
your reading, and it doesn’t disfigure the book for later readers. Perfect.
If you’re like me, you may also enjoy stopping to jot your responses
or other notes in the margins. But this is optional. The key is to
mark important points as you read them, while the information is
absolutely fresh in your mind.
In general, don’t hesitate over whether something is really
important, just mark it. We’re trying to stay out of study mode
here. You can make a final decision later.
On the other hand, if you’re marking 5 or 10 spots per page, that
could add up to a lot of cards. Some books may call for that. Many won’t.
Skip the highlighters (usually)
I used to use highlighters. Unless you’re a professional draftsman,
the results can be dispiriting. The next time you open the book, you
wonder if the previous reader was a manic kindergarten chimpanzee.
Also, if the paper doesn’t meet or exceed wedding-invitation-grade
thickness, the lines bleed through the page(s).
Plus, highlighting forces you to hesitate a little longer to choose
which words to highlight. And it’s permanent. And if you get too
enthusiastic, the whole page gets soggy with emphasis.
On the other hand, if you love the splash of color, you could make
dots and lines in the margin with a highlighter, instead of using a
pencil. And occasionally, color coding can be useful to sort out
dense, confusing information.
Use small sticky notes as bookmarks
Use the small sticky notes as bookmarks. Note the small. You want to
get pads that would be absolutely useless for leaving someone a real
note. Mine are 2” x 1.5”. You can get a big pack for a few bucks.
If you use bigger notes, they flap around like tire flaps. They get
crumpled when you put the book on a shelf. They’re depressing. Laugh
if you want, but these are the little details that can make the
difference between whether or not you stick with this.
You want to bookmark your place every time you stop reading. Yes, you
could use ordinary bookmarks (i.e., random scraps), but they fall out.
You can also stick a permanent note onto those occasional pages
you’ll want to hop to again. This can include charts, illustrations,
or summary pages. It’s a great way to flag information that is too
dense to memorize (easily), but too useful to sink into the
undifferentiated sea of pages.
What about library books?
Obviously, you can’t mark up library books. (I’ve read at least one
author suggest that you can make pencil notes, then go through and
carefully erase them all. Yeah. Maybe I’ll try that someday, when I
get tired of sorting paper clips.)
Instead, I take short notes as I go. I jot the page number and a
phrase. It’s enough to find the point again. If there will only be 20
or so points, you could flag them with sticky notes, I guess, but that
seems wasteful.
Then what?
So, you finish the book. Instead of simply reading, you’ve left a
breadcrumb trail through the forest of pages. You managed to do it
without disrupting the normal pleasure of reading. Look at you go!
Now comes a little extra work. How do you turn those hints into real memories?
We’ll find out next time.
