Marginalia

Marginalia

Understand, absorb and recall what you learn by using this technique.

1. You need a procedure to force yourself to interact with the semantic content of what you are reading. Semantic content is just a fancy word for meaning.
2. Your procedure should force you to think through the ideas in the text.
3. The name of this procedure is Marginalia. Meaning? Text written in the margin of a printed work.
4. When you are reading or studying, you want a procedure that will force you to think about the text that you are reading.
5. Here is the procedure:
   1. Read a paragraph and summarize it in one sentence. Don’t copy all the lines or most of the lines in the paragraph. You need to juice the core idea out of the paragraph.
   2. After that, go to the second paragraph.
   3. Then, you go to the third paragraph. But this time, you write two sentences in the margin.
      1. The first sentence needs to summarize the first and second paragraphs.
      2. The second sentence summarizes the third paragraph.
   4. And then you move on to the fourth paragraph. This one also gets two sentences in the margin.
      1. The first sentence to summarize all the previous paragraphs.
      2. The second sentence to summarize the fourth paragraph.
   5. And you keep going.
   6. Of course, you have to leave out things from each paragraph. This is where your critical thinking comes into play.

Speed reading is a scam.