Wednesday 23 September 2009

Effective reading

Two weeks ago I went to a workshop on this subject in Harvard University. It was my second experience as a student in other country (the first one was a Summer School and it was Spain so it doesn't count).
First I was surprised with the informality of this class. The teacher was wearing shorts, sandals and a very old T-shirt for sure. And this is Harvard, I thought.
Second, classes starting and ending times are religiously observed. If you're late, you're out.
And third, I thought I had learned how to read fast in college years ago. For sure, while studying Economics it was not the case. While I was going through the reading check-list they gave me, I noticed I could not have done much worse. A workshop like this would have helped me so much.
In fact we have to read so much that if we are really reading from beginning to end every book and paper, better not have more than one subject to study...
Read selectively, act as a detective and take your notes. Burn all under-liners and start to real write your notes!

3 comments:

  1. Olá!

    Taking notes is one of my biggest problems. For an organized person I'm really unorganized when it come to tacking notes.
    If you have any good tips please share :)
    I started using Zotero (I read some good reviews about it) some maybe that will help.

    Beijos,
    Leonor

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  2. One other problem is, obviously, proof reading my own comments to this blog and using the spell-checker, :), sorry!

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  3. In fact there was other workshop some days ago about taking effective notes. I couldn't go to this one, but there are some good materials about this same subject here:http://bsc.harvard.edu/onlineresources.htm#notemaking

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