Remember What You Read in 5 Steps
Well, one step, five times.
We want to read more. We want to remember what we read. We don’t want to push words into our eyes and out of our heads. Speedreading entices us, promising we’ll be able to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire within an hour. Speedreading promises that you’ll be reading more and that you’ll remember what you read.
But even granting speedreading is possible, becoming a speedreader isn’t speedy. The Superlearner course on Udemy admits that you need months of practise before you see any benefits.
This strategy is for people who actually want to remember what they read.
I assume you’re not a speedreader. I assume you want to read something now and not months in the future. I have a reading strategy for you.
I must warn you: this strategy will not help you read more. This strategy is for people who actually want to remember what they read. It is slower than speedreading — it is slower than regular reading.
But would you rather spend an hour reading and remember one thing, or spend two and remember ten?
You’ll read slower but better.
Step 1: Pick the right book
A lot of books don’t need reading strategies. A lot of books don’t need to be read at all. Many 400-page books, when they’re trimmed of anecdotes, digressions, sales pitches, repetitions, etc, can be reduced to a page. Read a summary of such a book, and you’ll have read the book.
Pick a book where every paragraph says something.
Step 2: Summarise every paragraph
This is the slow part.
In the margins, on a piece of paper, on a note-taking app, or wherever you please, condense the paragraph you’ve just read into a short sentence. What was the paragraph’s thrust?
Summarising forces you to recall and engage with what you’ve reading. When you read conventionally, moving your eyes continuously from word to word, it’s easy to get swept along by the text’s current.
You grasp each sentence, but lose grip on the paragraph, the section, the chapter, till the whole book slips through your fingers. Or perhaps its worse. You don’t even grasp the sentence, but you move on anyway, promising yourself you’ll come back to it and understand it later. When later comes, however, you’ve forgotten what you couldn’t understand.
Summarising forces you to grasp the paragraph.
Step 3: At a section’s end, summarise your summaries
On finishing a section, read your paragraph summaries. When you were summarising the paragraphs, you were mapping out the river as you rowed through. Now, you’re reading your map and seeing the whole river.
Summarise these summaries in a regular-sized sentence. This forces you to grasp the section. Of course, you won’t capture every detail, but you will capture the most important ones.
Step 4: At the chapter’s end, summarise your section summaries
You’ve read through a chapter, stopping at the end of each section to summarise what you’ve read. Now reread your section summaries and condense them into a short paragraph.
Writing and engaging with your summaries ... lodges the book’s argument in your mind.
From paragraph to section to chapter, we are condensing information. Writing and engaging with your summaries, pruning unnecessary information, lodges the book’s argument in your mind. Even what you leave out lodges deeper. You thought about what you left out, with an attentive mind you judged it unnecessary.
Step 5: At the book’s end, summarise your chapter summaries
You see the pattern. When you’ve summarised every chapter, reread your short paragraphs and summarise them in a page.
Conclusion
The point of this strategy is to engage with your reading. We are not just pouring words into our heads and hoping they stick. Engaging with books as we read them keeps them in our memory.
By summarising summaries, we review the book in a manageable form. We’re not rereading every page. We’re rereading a few sentences and paragraphs of our own creation.
So, pick up that introduction to quantum physics you’ve been meaning to read. Map out the flows and bends in the text, and you’ll be surprised how much of the river you remember.
