There are some clues if you want to read and remember. You read every time but sometimes have nothing to show for the reading. You spend much time reading but cannot remember the moment you step out. But you need to read and remember. You should train not to struggle with your mind to deliver what you think you had committed to it. You find it hard to remember what you read. You easily forget what you spent a lot of time and energy reading. This is awfully sad. It discourages and sometimes you would think there is no need to read again since you would only read to forget. No! Don’t get frustrated. Take note that nothing we read leaves our memory without making an impression. But we will be happier to see us ruminating over what we have read or even talk about it when we go out. Students will also wish to attend to exam questions in the most satisfactory way because they have read the course material; if only they can remember.
It is very important to read and remember whether you are a student, a worker, an entrepreneur or a politician. If you want to remember what you have read, read through this post and try to put the strategies into practice. You will certainly experience a great difference. We may not have exhausted all the possible effective reading strategies that enhance retention. The suggestions here will hopefully make reading more memorable and interesting to you.
- Read To Learn
No matter why you read, try to read to learn as well. If you read books to pass exams or just entertain yourself, you will find it difficult to remember what you read. Reading to learn is a very effective way of reading that will make you remember. If for instance you read a book on how to prepare a certain meal, you will be better able to remember it because your primary goal is to learn to cook the meal. When you read this same material for the purpose of exam, you will find yourself struggling to remember some of the steps. If you had read to learn the thing so that you would know them and make them part of you, you would surely remember them. So when next you read for any exam, or read as a student, try to learn those things and make them part of you. Don’t think about the exam; think about the possibility of knowing that thing such that if you meet the author tomorrow you could engage him or her in a chat on what they wrote. So, whenever you pick up any material to read, have it in your mind that you are reading to learn something and make it a part of you.
- Practicalize The Knowledge
It is one thing to read a book and another to put to use what you have read. If you do not bring what you read or the information you got from a book to bear, on your situation, you may forget it. If as a chemistry student you read about chemical change that occurs in mixtures, for instance, you can relate it to what happens in your kitchen. In your kitchen, you bring a number of ingredients together in a pot under certain temperature and pressure to become one thing – soup. The moment you bring this theory into practical terms, you will find it hard to forget it even when you try. Practice what you read, relate it to any familiar situation and even when the words of the papers elude you, the ideas or processes remain such that you can weave them in your own words and still communicate the points. What you learn in engineering classes can be applied even in your room. So practicalize the knowledge. Try practicing and objectifying the things you read. The act will help you remember what you read.
- Read With Concentration
When you read, don’t be passive. Don’t allow distractions. Read with maximum concentration. Be active in your reading. Distractions, as little as they may seem, are enough to make you lose the line of argument going on in what you’re reading. Every book is a chain of thought, and for you to understand better, you have to follow the chain without abrupt break. There is a close resemblance in the processes of reading and writing. The same way you would feel lost when distracted as you pen down a line of thought is the same way your brain would feel when a sequence of thought in the material you are reading is pierced. Philosophical writings are usually of this sort. To understand and remember, you need to follow the thought as it progresses, and be guided by pauses given by the author in the forms of paragraphs, subtitles, parts, chapters, etc. Passive reading results to a fleeting visit of ideas to our minds. They do not stay beyond welcome pleasantries, that is, the joy of making sense of the words. You need to bring your mind to what you are reading. Stop reading when you remember that your special friend or your debt or your recent victory or the scuffle with whomever or anything else outside the material you want to read. You should not allow your mind to be jumping around. Force it to stay one place. Don’t read to distract your thoughts unless you are ready to have nothing to show for such reading.
- Read With Limits
There is no point spending the whole day or more hours reading when your brain can hardly retain what you read the last thirty minutes. Value quality, not quantity. Spend quality time reading. Depending on the type of book and why you are reading, you may need to only take at most twenty pages a day. Students during exams usually find themselves struggling to cover the course work. This is why they continue to read even when they are convinced that law of maximum utility and diminishing return has set in. You don’t have to jam-pack a lot of information into your head within a little space of time. Things read within a short duration are seldom retained. So, in order to remember what you have read, read with limit. Don’t spend many hours on the desk when you’re not concentrating. Depending on what you are reading, you may not need to read beyond three to six hours on the desk during a reading session. You may succeed in doing writing and other things but reading to remember may not work for a duration longer than three to six hours. Again, all depends on what you’re reading. Whenever you notice the first sign of tiredness, get off the seat or look off the book and relax. While you relax, cast your mind on the ideas you have got already. Try to digest them during this period. Take a walk, during which you give more time to thinking about the little you have read. This will make the memory last long.
- Critique/Interrogate As You Read
Reading should be an interactional process between the author (his ideas in the book) and the reader (your ideas in the mind). That is what critical reading is all about. You will certainly remember anything you read critically. When you read and try to judge the submissions or suggestions of the author in relation to what you already know, you will remember more. Making intelligent deliberations and interrogations as you read will also open new lines of knowledge for you. Don’t just ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ what the writer wrote. Try to weigh the degree of its factuality vis-a-vis what you already know. Some things you read may agree with what you already know while others may not. This interrogation or critiquing will also help you to connect or link what you are reading to what you already know. When I read Jonathan Culler on literature, I found certain correspondences in his opinions with those of Amechi Akwanya. This made me think further how universal knowledge is, so much so that people from different continents could hold similar opinions about something. This thought further digressed to implicate Carl Jung’s idea of collective unconsciousness as the explanation to these shared views or ideas. This is how reading is done. And it will remain indelible and leave impressive impression on the reader.
- Discuss What You Read
Some people find it difficult to share their knowledge with others. They think that people will know more than they do when they share their knowledge with them. On the contrary, discussing what you read pays you more than the people that hear you talk about it. Talking about what you read by sharing the ideas from the book with a friend or teaching your mates will not only increase your understanding of the subject but will also increase the memory span of the knowledge. When you talk about them, chances are that you will find new gateways or breakthroughs around the subject. You will make more sense of the subject by speaking about it. You will be better able to remember what you have spoken about. It is like reading the stuff three times. Your reading counts as one, while talking about it in your hearing counts as two. This is because your mind does not just register the sounds that bear the knowledge but also the efforts you make to let others understand it and the various ways you try to explain it to them. So, you know better what you discuss or share with others. Take absolute note that sharing will not decrease your knowledge. It will rather widen your understanding of the subject and make for better retention.
- Find A Suitable Atmosphere
Your reading environment also influences retention. Different people have different atmosphere that applies to them. Some people cannot read at all in a rowdy environment while others can. It is actually difficult to agree that true reading can go with music of any kind. However, some people are able to read in such atmosphere. It is like doing the same thing from two different things with the same brain at same time: listening to the sounds, and to the letters/ graphs you are reading or studying. However, no matter how much you claim to read concentratively in a noisy environment or with music playing, you stand the chance of losing whatever idea you read or, at least, shorten the memory span of the ideas in your mind. Libraries and reading rooms are usually calm because the best reading environment is a calm one. This is why many people prefer reading at midnight. That is when the external and internal environments are relaxed and concentration is high. So, if you want to read to remember, consider the environment or atmosphere in which you read. Do not read near a road, or where a game is going on or where music is playing, unless you are not reading to remember. When you read and play music, you will intermittently catch yourself nodding to the music or even humming or singing along. And you say you are still reading? If you can read and understand while music is playing, you will be a genius if you train yourself to read in a quiet environment.
- Consider Reading Aloud
I don’t fancy this one anyway, but it works for some. Reading aloud is said to be a good way to remember what one reads. The way we retain what we hear is the way we retain what we read aloud. When we read aloud, we tend to call the auditory system into work as well so that not only the mind and the visual system are at work. But I hope too many cooks do not spoil the broth in this case. This may be really distracting for some people. You may get carried away by the sweetness of your pronunciation or the rhythmic cadence of your reading. Then, understanding and retention may be tampered with. You just have to try it, and if it doesn’t work, don’t wait for a second time to drop it off. That’s why the subtitle says ‘Consider Reading Aloud’.
- Read Without Hurry
Your reading speed influences how much you can remember of what you have read. Do some experiments. Read a passage hurriedly and see if you will even make sense of the passage. Then, read slowly, taking care to note the sense without hurry. There is no need to finish a book within a short time without remembering anything or enough things from the book. There could be a prize for speed-reading but the ultimate prize for reading is to understand and remember. Don’t read to impress or to compete. Read to remember. And if you must remember, you need not be in a hurry to finish the material. If you interrogate books, you will find out that you will spend more time reconciling a lot of things about the book such that in a day, you may only succeed in reading less than twenty pages, depending on what you’re reading. But that’s fair enough. Read slowly and you will probably remember more.
- Take Notes
It is good to make notes when you read a book. The interrogations you make, the ideas that crop up, and the links you create, write them down on a separate note. Good readers make great writers because their works are usually responses to other works they read. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is said to be a response to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Maybe that great novel would not have been written if the author had read the other two novels passively, without taking notes. Even when the new book is not a response, it may depend on the former book for the nucleus of its argument. Books are usually indebted to other books. But that is if the reader took notes of what they read. You will have a way of reminding yourself what the book is about, the bends, the conflicts, the disagreements and the breakthroughs in a book if you take notes. Notes are better than marginalia because they go for books you don’t owe, and can remain with you when the book is lost and give enough spaces to write as much as you want unlike the limited space book margins affords.
- Know What Book It Is
Have a general knowledge of the book before reading. You will be better disposed to read books when you know beforehand what kind of stuff they are: motivational, health, relationship, philosophical, creative, critical etc. Different books require different reading disposition. Know what kind of book it is, the arrangement of the ideas, and the motivation for the writing, the background of the book and the reception of the book. This preliminary information will help boost your interest to read the book with utmost concentration. If for no other thing, you will read actively, at least to make your own conclusion about the book. Your reading may either disagree or agree with the existing opinions on the book. You will not forget the book or the ideas because there is a ground upon which your reading stands. This general knowledge can be got from the blurb, the preface, introduction, review or even a Google search on the book. However, mind you that this information may guide your reading such that you may begin to read the work in the light of those opinions. Be on your guard against such undesirable guides. Depending on what you’re reading, be critical in your own reading despite what you have read about the book.
- Know Why You’re Reading/ Read In Context
Certain readings demand special strategy. This is why you need to read in contexts. If you are reading to edit or review or critique or translate etc., you need different mental dispositions as well as retention. While you need to understand whatever you read, be conscious of why you are reading a particular book. But when you do not have any given reason, borrow from what we have given you: read to learn and teach the book. When you read to review, your attention will have to be on certain key definers of the mood, tone, critical turn and submissions of the book. You may need the names of the characters, if it is a creative work for instance, less than the person who reads the same work for an exam. If you are reading to translate, of course not just the letters but the spirit of the book needs to be comprehended. Remembering in that case is sure unless your translation is a word to word. Of course, that is a poor way of doing translation. The point is – be aware of why you are reading and tune your mind to the demands of the reading. Read the same book severally, as context demands.
- Read As If You Will Teach The Subject
What has worked for me most over the years is reading as if I will teach the subject. I often teach, anyway. But the idea is that you could read, telling yourself that the moment you step out of the room, someone would beg you to explain something to them, and the thing coincidentally would be what you just read. It feels unfair to step out to meet a question on what you have been reading only to find out you have really retained nothing! Try reading with the consciousness that you will teach someone the subject or topic. If no one asked you about it that day, imagine the next day as the day it would come. With that, the knowledge will become a part of you. You would not want to feel the frustration of being asked something you remember reading but cannot remember the content. So, read as if you will teach the subject. This strategy will also make your understanding of the topic clearer. Of course, you cannot teach someone what you did not understand. This will help you think up examples and real life situations that explain those topics. You can’t forget something you manufactured and appropriated example or illustration for.
- Link What You Are Reading To What You Already Know
Do you know that knowledge is a chain reaction? Everything you read or will read relates or connects to something that already exists in your mind. Read about archetypes, and you’ll understand this better. You may find yourself, while reading about the idea of repetition in the structure of realities, recalling déjà vu. There may not be any established link but your relating what you are reading to what you already know will help you find how common almost all knowledge is. Nothing is actually new! We repeat things with a veil of novelty. So, when you read, you will be better able to understand and remember when you link the ideas to something that already exists on your mind.
- Highlight Points
There is no way you will remember all you have read if you don’t highlight some points. Use a highlighting pen or pencil to mark some important points you would need to remember. These points may bear the entire idea of the book. So you need to highlight them. When you go back to the book, you will only have to look at the phrases highlighted, and your memory will be refreshed. There is no magic about it. Even when you think you have understood and will remember, highlight points when you read. You might need the exact quotation some day or catch yourself groping for the idea. Only a return to the highlighted points will save the situation. You will find it difficult to locate these important points if you didn’t mark them somehow. When you highlight, do it neatly and carefully.
- Read To Understand
It is one thing to read and another to understand. Many people read, especially students, trying just to commit the lines to memory without making any sense of them. This is a poor reading habit. Do you remember Chatur Ramalingam, alias Silencer of the 2009 Bollywood movie, 3 Idiots? His unfortunate experience of cramming says a lot. Swotting up books will get you on the risk of messing up everything because of, say, a single word. The loss of a word or two will leave your brain browned out. If you want to remember what you have read, read to understand. When you understand the book or a material, or a topic, the words of the author will come automatically. When the words of the author do not come as fast as we want, we can use our own words to convey the ideas because we have understood the topic. So, do not read to have the lines packed in your brain or just to finish the book. Read to understand the book. We are aware that it is hard to read in a language different from your first language (mother tongue).
- Look Up Unfamiliar Words In A Dictionary
You never know how much a word you do not know its meaning impedes your understanding of the book you read. Do not blame the author for using big words. No two words are the same; they can only be similar. In writing, diction, otherwise called choice of words, may require an author to use a word which may sound unfamiliar to you, because it is the most appropriate for the context. In order to appreciate and remember what you are reading, stop anytime you find an unfamiliar word. Look up the word in a good dictionary. Learn all the meaning of the word and see which meaning is implied in the particular usage. Don’t take any word for granted. Authors do not use words that are not necessary in their writing. So don’t ignore any. Words, each, make a contribution to the overall meaning of the book. It is like a circuit. To miss the meaning of a word is like cutting a wire that closes the circuit for a light bulb. The meaning of that electric circuit which is light from the bulb will certainly be lost. So, take words seriously when you read. Look up difficult ones in a dictionary if you must understand and remember what you read.
- Create Mnemonics
It is easier to remember things in models than as they are read. You can create acronyms from the first letters of a list. After many years many of us can still remember the characteristics of living things because we learnt them through acronym: MR NIGER D (movement, respiration, nutrition, irritability, growth, excretion and death). This is usually good for things that are in a list. Sometimes, we can make a sentence or a phrase to remember certain things. In my high school days, I taught myself the voiceless consonants through mnemonics. I would need to say ‘Tell Keke & Femi Some Shocking Church Historical Theories’ to remember them. The initial sounds in this sentence make up the voiceless consonants. Even when I teach, I say this phrase in order to remember. In any exam hall, I will use this phrase to distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants. For the first twenty elements, my friend and I would use: He Has Little Brain But Could Not Offer Full Nine Subjects. Many Arts Students Pass Some Courses About Potassium Calcium. This looks childish and silly but it works. Try giving yourself the troubles of forming models in form of mnemonics that will help you remember what you read. You really need to be creative about this. You will have to take some time out to create this. But it remains with you, I mean the knowledge, forever.
Reading is a conscious activity that should increase our wealth of knowledge. When we read, we hope to become better. But this will happen if only we remember those things we read. The above suggestions are tested ways that improve retention after reading. Some of them require discipline to imbibe or even practice. They are not impossible however. You only need to try them out, no matter how difficult they seem. You will certainly be better. The frustration that follows your reading and forgetting will be an old story. And you will be happier reading.
Bignedu
