Spring semester is in full bloom and many of us are buried in piles of readings and homework. As an English major, a lot of the readings I do are classic texts and academic essays, and I learned pretty quickly that if you don’t have a good system for understanding these, you can easily fall behind. Here are five practices that help me understand my readings.
#1: Create a Highlighting system
Back in high school, I created a color-coded system for highlighting things in my books. For example, passages highlighted in green are about characters, yellow means important events, orange means vocab, blue means I can write about it in an essay, and purple means it can be attributed to a universal theme. These colors are up to you, but keeping up a consistent system has greatly helped me understand classic texts. Plus, actively associating key information with bright colors creates a fast way to look up quotes for in-class discussions or to use in essays.
#2: Listen to an audiobook
One great thing about classics is that a lot of them have audiobook versions available for free online. What I usually do is find an audiobook on YouTube and listen to it while I read along with the physical book. I feel that I’m able to digest the information better than I do when just focusing on reading and getting through pages upon pages.
#3: Use SparkNotes
In high school, I’d always hear teachers say to not use SparkNotes, that it’s cheating, and that we need to read the books ourselves to fully understand them. But what if you don’t understand what you’re reading or are unsure if you’re interpreting it right? You can go to SparkNotes and get the summary to clear up what you’ve read. For example, I read a chapter of a book, then go to SparkNotes and read the summary to confirm that what I’ve just read and understood is actually what I should have read and understood.
#4: SUMmarize with AI/ChatGPT
In no way am I advocating for people to use ChatGPT or any AI to do their work for them, but it can be a tool in other ways if used correctly. Sometimes books and essays don’t have a SparkNotes page because they aren’t popular; this is where AI/ChatGPT comes in. You can ask it to describe chapters, books, or essays in simple terms and it will generate an easy-to-read summary for you, which is helpful when studying things like philosophy.
#5: GoogLE vocab words
College-level reading is different from high school-level reading, where you’d have someone to guide you and clear up unknown words. In college, professors don’t have the time to explain what a new vocabulary word means. For a while, I thought that if I kept reading then the meanings would come to me, but that’s not the case. There’s no shame in using Google to look up vocabulary that you don’t understand. It benefits you in so many ways, expands your knowledge, and helps you understand your readings.
It never hurts to try new things, especially when studying. These are things that I’ve learned along my educational journey and that work for me. Something that works for me might not work for you. Studying is unique to you and you have to find what works. You want to be an academic weapon, not an academic victim.