According to Daniel Coyle’s “The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills,” the best way to learn from a book isn’t to read and reread. Instead, read it once and then write a one-page summary.
Here’s the passage as quoted on this blog:
“Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book—a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath—doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning. On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.”
To be honest, if someone had recommended this to me when I was in high school, I would have rolled my eyes and moved on with reading (and rereading).
But this exercise isn’t about writing—it’s about learning.
I’ve written before that the most effective way to really know something is to prepare to teach it. In fact, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feymann did it when wrapping his brain around concepts far more complex than high school homework assignments, as explained here by study skills author Scott Young.
To write a one-page summary of a book forces you to review the key ideas, to make distinctions between what’s important and what isn’t, and to explain how each concept ties into the overall message of the reading. If you can do those things, you understand what you’ve read.
So even if you take what would have been my high school approach and laugh off the idea of writing the summary (I don’t blame you), instead, just take 10 minutes and teach it back as if you were standing in front of the class. You won’t laugh it off once you try it.
And here’s a past post of mine with five habits of highly-effective students.