Study Tip: Boost Learning by Summarizing Your Notes

Effective note-taking is a skill that will help you in every subject you'll study in school, and while I'm not an evangelist of any one note-taking system over another, I do have one simple tip that will help you boost your learning, no matter what style of notes you take. That tip is this: summarize your notes.

Why? Well, as anyone with pages full of notes that stop making sense the day after class knows, notes have limitations. The simple act of taking them doesn't always guarantee retention. That's why it's important to summarize your notes.

The way you do it is simple. For each class lecture or reading for which you've taken notes, write a brief summary of your notes. Write it as if you're explaining what you've just learned to someone who wasn't in class that day or didn't do that reading: be clear, and don't assume that your imaginary reader is familiar with the class material. The summary doesn't have to be any particular length, just long enough to clearly and thoroughly cover whatever material you need to learn.

This works because it forces you to think about what you're learning and to express it in your own words. Many times, simply hearing something isn't enough to make it stick. When you have to explain something, you learn it better yourself.

Don't Cite Wikipedia as a Source

Just don't do it.
   
For casual curiosity, Wikipedia's a great resource. I can spend hours looking up my favorite foods and cuisines on Wikipedia and always feel like I've come away with some new knowledge. For formal, academic writing, however, Wikipedia is not so great.
   
The reason for this is simple: Wikipedia is an open-source, user-edited resource. Technically, anyone can edit a Wikipedia page. The information you find there isn't necessarily written or checked by experts in the field, and there aren't enough experts to constantly police every single article to catch mistakes--or deliberate misinformation--when they appear. My favorite Wikipedia story has to do with the entry on butter. For several hours one day, this line appeared on the "Butter" page: "Butter is also used to rub on Kyle's belly."
   
Crazy, right?
   
Most teachers are aware of Wikipedia's weaknesses and won't accept it as a credible research source.
   
What Wikipedia can be good for, however, is giving you a start on your real research. If you look at a Wikipedia entry, you'll see links within the text leading you down to sources listed at the bottom of the page. These sources, used to verify the information in the Wikipedia entry, are generally more credible than Wikipedia itself. Follow those links, and you may come up with better research.

How to Improve Almost Any Paper

I've been an English tutor at San Diego City College's English Center for a year and a half now. In that time, I've helped countless students plan, write, and revise countless essays while going to school myself and working on my own essay writing skills. I've learned a lot about what makes a strong essay. In most cases, that "what" boils down to just a few simple things that just about anyone can use to make any essay stronger. Read my five-point plan for better papers after the jump.