RC skeleton / ToC speed

[Guest]

Here's my problem: I seem to read the long passages completely within 2:30 minutes. When I start writing down the skeleton, I slow down and end up taking ~ 4mins. Given that keywords are pretty easy to notice in short / even a long passage, do you still recommend that I write something down to improve comprehension ? As far as I've noticed, my comprehension is the same regardless of whether I write down stuff or not. And I always seem to refer back to the passage if I have some doubt, rather than look at what I wrote down! Please do give me your suggestions. thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

First, I wouldn't write down keywords at all, just main ideas. Second, I would absolutely go back to the passage to find answers to any detailed questions.

Think of your notes this way: you're just trying to make a short table of contents so that you know the main ideas and so that you know where (in which paragraph) specific types of information can be found. You should be able to answer any "big idea" questions without going back to the passage but you should NOT be able to answer any "specific detail" questions without going back to the passage. Instead, you should be able to decide quickly from your table of contents which paragraph you need to go to in order to answer the specific detail question - and then you go to that paragraph and learn what you need to learn.

This allows you to take notes much more quickly on the first read-through and also allows you to use the information efficiently. We don't want to get too into all of that detail on the first read-through because they're going to write about twice as many questions as they're going to give any one person. In other words, I know I'm not going to get questions about all of the detail, because I'm not going to see all of the questions that were written for this passage!

Use serious abbreviations, label your info by paragraph (P1, P2, etc), and know that it's rare to have more than one line of notes per paragraph - maybe a mix of 5-10 words / symbols / abbreviations per paragraph. (That can obviously vary depending upon your short-term memory.) The stuff written out in the book is way too long! :)