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Study Effectively

What are the pros and cons of highlighting?

The pros

  • It takes less time than note taking
  • Charts and graphs from text readily available

The cons

  • It's very easy to do badly; highlighting can fool you into thinking you're learning material when what you're really doing is colouring
  • Students usually highlight 70-80% of the textbooks, but experts highlight 10-15%
  • You may end up rereading most of the textbook in order to understand the parts you've highlighted
  • You can't combine highlighted text with your lecture notes

What are the pros and cons of notetaking?

The pros

  • Note-taking forces you to think about the content of the textbook and choose the most important information
  • It's easy to combine your textbook notes and lecture notes together to create your own study guide for quizzes and exams
  • Writing notes in your own words can help you check your understanding of the textbook content
  • If you take your notes on your laptop, you can easily change your notes into cue cards, test questions and answers, or other formats for studying

The cons

  • It takes more time than highlighting
  • It's easy to start copying text directly from the textbook instead of taking the time to write notes in your own words

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