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Remembering Tips 67 REMEMBERING TIP 12 Keep Squeezing Your Notes Once you've done the learning on your coursework-the part of your brainwork that enables you to understand itthe only thing that will help you remember it long enough to do well in the end-term exam is to keep reviewing it on the schedule we've suggested (see Remembering Tip 1). The trouble is, if you reviewed all your notes for every course at least five times through, by the end of the semester you'd be spending a monumental amount of time on review. The smartest students keep compressing their notes into smaller and smaller size. As they understand relationships between one week's work and the next, they consolidate and organize. By the end of the course, they can tell you most of the main ideas, subordinate ideas, definitions, and examples just by consulting a few pages or 3 x 5 cards. This constant consolidation works in nearly every course, and it pays off in big dividends. As you review, keep squeezing your own notes. Play with the material as we suggested in Remembering Tip 9: organize it into charts, formulas, or other short-form arrangements . Having to organize and compress will force you to see the relationships between ideas that get people A's on exams. It will help you to focus on the big picture that's more important, in writing an essay, than all the little details and facts. (Knowing the facts and details only raises your essay grades if you know what statements they support.) If you compress the path of the Industrial Revolution on a chart, you may suddenly discover that the canning industry (page 45 of your notes) was exempt from child labor laws (page 24)-a point that neither instructor nor textbook bothered to make in so many words. 68 STUDY SMARTS Whenever you discover relationships in your notes, think about them and see if you can draw some inferences or conclusions of your own from them. (In this case, was it because the cannery owners were a powerful group of lobbyists ?) Being able to draw independent conclusions from the facts automatically earns a better grade. Once a week, consolidate that week's notes. This will serve as your one-week review. Once a month, squeeze the four weeks' notes into one or two pages of clue words and patterns, for a good one-month review. Then, before each big exam, do a final organization and consolidation. Make sure, as you go, that your notes are completely accurate. Don't trust your memory, but check facts carefully between one set of notes and the next. After you have your notes consolidated, each time, check your memory. Make sure that you remember correctly what the cue word, formula, or main idea you've written down is supposed to stand for. Make sure that what you leave out, as you compress, is firmly associated with your compressed note in your memory . By the end of the term, when you see E 6!! mel, you should be able to rattle off the definition, derivation, history, uses, and whatever else your instructor expects you to be responsible for in connection with the equation. Your associative memory will be working right on cue. ...

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