Good studying techniques are very useful for every student! However, effective to improve the studying efficiency still is a problem for the students. There are three skills are very important for the students: reading, note taking, and recalling.

Reading skills can be divided into three ways: active reading, highlighting, and paraphrasing. First, if students want to improve the reading skills, they have to read actively. Also, when students are reading the essay, they must start with the question, and they should know the reading purposes. For example, if students don’t take the purposes and questions to read the essay, it equals they never read this essay, and their reading is ineffective. Reading for them is wasting time! Second, students have to underline some important idea in each paragraph. It can help the students to remember the content. Third, students should use the own words to paraphrase the essay after their reading. It helps students to real understand the content.

Also, note-taking is a very important studying skill. It can be classified into three ways: outlining, mind-mapping, and splitting. First, students should outline the essay contents after their reading. It can help students to know the main idea clearly. Second, students may take some single words and use their mind to connect to a map. Then, students can make some senses among these words. Next, students have to learn how to split the note. For example, when students are attending a class, they have to take the notes on the paper’s a side. After they come back, they should review the notes and arrange the note again. At the same time, they should put the new notes on the paper’s another side. Then, the note will be clearly and easy to understand.

In addition, recalling is very useful for the students. It may be divided into two ways: visualization and acronyms. First, students can use the visualization. Some students like to learn new words; however, some words are very difficult to understand. So students can image some pictures to impress and remember these words. Next, students can use the acronyms. For example, “and”, “or”, “but”, “so”, “not”, “yet”, and “for” are coordinating conjunction word. However, as result of too many words, it’s very easy to lost one word. Thus, students can take first letter of each word and make a new word-“fanboys”. Now, students only need to remember one word, and they can easy to remember all the coordinating conjunction words.

Consequently, I hope every student can make these skills memorable and make them become theirs. Also, I hope every student can use these skills to improve their studying techniques!

April 2003