Textbooks and other readings. You'll be doing a lot of reading in college. In fact, your readings are likely to take up the majority of your study time. They will be the foundation of your knowledge and the source of many of the test questions on your exams. You will likely have one or more textbooks in each class, but you may also have a lot of outside readings in the form of PDFs or online sources.
If you are assigned PDFs and other outside readings, print them all out on day one. There are two reasons for this. The first is for planning. If you remember, when you're setting up your reading tasks inside Shovel, it's important to know the page count, line spacing, and level of difficulty so you can make reasonable estimates of how long each reading might take. Secondly, you want to have them ready when you need them. You don't want to be looking for a printer when it's time to get them done.
We recommend to never do your readings on a computer. The science says that retention is not as high. If you have to use a device, use a tablet. There, you can underline, write notes, and create test questions in the margins the same way you would on paper. Get them all into Shovel. I cover how to get all of your readings organized inside Shovel in the Real Study Plan Secrets course—please watch that first if you haven't already.
Start with the end in mind. Before you start any reading assignment, always start with the end in mind. In the case of readings, there are really two ends. The first is to be prepared for every lecture, and the second is to be prepared for every exam.
A common question that students ask is if they can skip readings. It's a topic in some of these books as well. Some authors go as far as to say that it isn't necessary to read your textbooks because you'll just get the material in your lecture. Others say to just skim textbooks—read the headers, skim the paragraphs, and read the conclusion. We don't agree with this. This kind of shortcutting is not going to help you at all. First of all, your professor assigned these readings for a reason. They know that lecture is way more productive when you show up prepared. Trying to learn new material in lecture isn't efficient. You can't control the flow of a lecture, but you can control the flow of your own reading. You need to be able to learn the material at your own pace, to be able to stop when you don't understand something, to look up words, to give it some thought. There's no stopping a lecture—so read first, then listen to the lecture. You'll understand both way better when you do.
Also remember that the ultimate end is doing well on your exam. The way you do your readings is going to make a huge difference in how well you do on your exams. So to sum it up, our advice is to always try to read every page that is assigned to you. That said, I know that it isn't always possible. I was a hockey player and my schedule was always full. Also, there are some professors who assign more readings than is humanly possible to do. I experienced that too, but that was more of an exception. Most students with a normal schedule should have enough time to get all of their readings done.
Jim told me that he read every single word that was ever assigned to him in both college and law school. The good news is that you will not have to guess if you'll have enough time to get a particular reading done. If you remember, when you set up your tasks in Shovel, you'll be able to check your Cushion graph and see for sure if you have time to get each reading done on time. So just plan on doing your readings unless Shovel tells you otherwise.
Okay, let's start reading. Here's what to do. Get the big picture. When you open a textbook for the first time, get the big picture. You're going to be inside the book all semester, so get to know it. Read the introduction. Look through the table of contents. Get a feel for what you're going to cover. Read the first couple of chapters’ titles, look at the images, read the conclusions, see how chapters are structured and what each one is about. Everything you read is the foundation for something to follow. When you understand where the book is going, it helps you make more sense of what you're reading.
Start early. Some people say you should wait to do a reading until you're close to the lecture so things are fresh in your mind. We say, just get it done—and the sooner, the better. It may be harder or take longer than you think, so err on the side of caution.
Remember, when you first set up all of your tasks in Shovel, you made some initial estimates of how long your readings would take based on the reading speed of each reading source and the number of pages you need to read. You don't really know how accurate those estimates are until you do a few readings, so just to be safe, do your first readings as soon as you can.
Readings are unique in that you want to try to establish a reading time per page for each reading source. Every time you do your reading, time yourself and establish a baseline for your average time per page. Once you have that, you can quickly adjust your initial estimate and update your plan across all of your remaining readings with the click of a button. This is super important to do on all of your reading tasks. After the first week of tweaking estimates, you'll have a highly accurate plan going forward.
How to read: when you start to read anything, do it with the end in mind—the exam. On every paragraph of every page, you should be asking yourself, "Is what I'm reading something that is likely to be on the exam?" If so, your goal is to highlight that material as concisely as you possibly can.
Highlighting is a great technique because it supports our self-testing methodology, but we like it for other reasons as well. First, concentration. When you are reading new and complicated material, it's hard to stay focused. When you highlight, it forces you to concentrate because you're not just reading, you're reading with a purpose. You're always looking specifically for what is likely to appear on the exam. You are constantly thinking about what are the most important points and the most concise ways to abbreviate them. This way, you're already preparing for the exam.
Highlighting also reinforces repetition. Often, you're forced to read the material twice. On your first pass, you'll read the paragraph entirely so you're clear about what is important. Then you go back and highlight it to make it more concise. Yes, that takes an extra bit of time, but it saves you multiples of time later when you go to review and self-test it.
Highlighting doesn't necessarily mean using a yellow highlighter. Jim liked to use a mechanical pencil so he could underline, write notes, question marks, and other comments without stopping. Now, you can do that on an iPad or a tablet if you want, but many studies say that paper is still better for retention.
When reading, the questions you should be asking are: "What is testable material?" and "How do you make it concise?" The answer is—you'll know it when you see it. There are so many different types of textbooks with an endless variety of content. I kind of view doing my readings the same way as taking notes in lecture. It's moving too fast to get it all verbatim, so I need to listen carefully and try to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's the same in any reading you do. There is lots of filler in there. We're not saying it isn't important—because it is. That's why we say to read everything that's ever assigned to you. But most words in a paragraph set the stage for the central point that the paragraph is trying to make.
You are looking for the most critical points in each paragraph and sentence and the best way to shorten them to trigger phrases—just enough for you to recall the concept. The wrong way to highlight is highlighting entire paragraphs. If you highlight everything, then you don't know what's actually important. With practice, you'll start to make whole sentences that make perfect sense using words spread across the paragraph. At some point, it may just look like a chopped-up bunch of words spread across an entire page, but if it's enough for you to understand it, then that's all you need.
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A lot of your college reading is going to be new and complicated material. I cannot count the number of times I read pages and was seriously confused about what I was reading. New words and completely new concepts were an everyday thing in my classes. The question mark in the margin was one of my most used notes. If you don't understand something, make sure you get it cleared up as quickly as you can. If your reading is confusing, your lecture will be too. So make a goal to understand everything you read before you get to class.
Write test questions. Okay, so you've read it, you've highlighted the important points, and you understand everything. Now it's time to set things up for practice by writing some test questions. This is where your highlighting pays off. Remember, self-testing is one of the most useful study techniques you can use. Go back over each page of your textbook and look at every highlighted section. Then ask yourself, "How might the professor ask about this content on the exam?" Then write the question. Write the test questions in the margins if you can. Some books have very wide margins for adding comments. If not, you can use a notebook and write them there.
Probably the easiest way is to use Google Docs. You can voice dictate the question and then add a reference to a specific page number of your textbook. You can quickly review your highlighted pages, think of questions, and dictate them onto a page. It takes minutes to do and will save you hours of study time later.
Wrap it up. Treat every single thing that you do in college as a separate unit—your class notes, your readings, and any other assignments. As you finish each one, ask yourself: Is it completely done? Do I understand it? Is it prepared for review? If you had to take an exam on just this one reading, how would you do? The point is to never leave any loose ends before you start on something new. Make sure you're completely done with what you're currently working on.
Time—how long things take. As you're getting your readings done, don't forget about your study plan. In a study plan, everything is an estimate. Our recommendation is that you include everything you just did as part of your time-per-page estimate—the reading, the highlighting, and the writing of test questions. That's all related to the reading. Your goal is to always have the most accurate study plan that you can. So underestimating here will not help. If you mark a planned study block in Shovel complete and enter the number of pages you read—or rather, that you've wrapped up—it will tell you if the average time per page has changed. If it has, you can adjust it with the click of a button. Now all your future readings from that reading source will adjust their estimates. The point is to never have any surprises.
Look ahead. Another way to anticipate changes to your plan is to just look ahead. When you finish a reading assignment, just take a quick scan of the next chapter. Does it look harder? Do you think it may take more time? Should you start a day early? Your instincts will tell you. Always look ahead to avoid getting behind.
Don't lose it. You've invested a lot of time and effort into reading and highlighting your textbook, so what would happen if you lost it? Would that affect your ability to review? Guard that book with your life.
Okay, let's recap. You've organized all of your readings in Shovel. You've estimated how long they're going to take. You're going to read every word. You're going to focus on finding the testable material and then highlighting it as concisely as you can. And you're going to write test questions for each of the concepts. Now you're ready for class, and I'll talk about that in the next video.