Touch Typing

Another very useful skill to have is to be able to touch type. No university student is going to be without a laptop or a computer nowadays and other than developing short notes for your studying, a lot of your time is going to be spent writing assignments and essays. The best way to improve your grades and your writing is to be able to type faster and this is where touch typing comes in. It is the ability to be able to type sentences and entire documents without ever looking at the keyboard with minimal or no errors in the text.

Why does this improve your grades and your writing? Simple. Because one 0f the biggest problems is that our typing can never keep up with our pace of thought. So while writing your latest assignement, as the flow of words and sentences forms in your brain, you have probably only typed a few words. How many times have you come up with a nice para only to find that you cant remember everything you thought of. The other factor is speed, the faster you type the more you will get done sooner, thereby giving you more time to make the corrections that you will probably always need to be making.

There are plent of books and software you can buy or download that will teach you how to touch type. One additional help would be if you spend a lot of time at the computer, this tends to make it easier to learn touch typing as you have already gotten used which key is where. Your performance and typing speed will greatly depend on what keyboard you have been typing on but regardless, if you only ever use your own computer or laptop you should see massive speed increases in a very short period of time.

Study Faster With Speed Reading

One of the best ways to reduce your study time, or at the very least, reduce the time it takes for you to study is to master the concept of speed reading. Not simply just reading fast, but to maintain standard levels of comprehension when reading. Learning to speed read is not as hard as you might think. All it takes is learning the basic principles behind it and then spending a short time practising. The best part about it is that you can actually practice with whatever study materials you have, so in effect you will also be learning whatever it is you are practising.

There are a lot of different kinds speed reading techniques available and you will need to try a few to see what works for you. One of the most common methods is to be able to identify words, not as a collection of letters but as a single object. So for example the word “the” would be recognized in its whole form and not from the three letters combined. When reading you would pickup “the” as a single entity instead of seeing the letters “t”, “h” and then “e”. Its actually a very simple concept and does not require any great talent.

Another method is to be able to identify words just by the shape of the top of the word. In that sense almost all words are unique to the shape at the very top and this technique goes a long way to radically improving your speed.

At the end of the day, once you have the hang of speed reading, with the proper comprehension levels, you can read a text book in roughly a quarter of the time it would normally take you. This means that you can either spend a quarter of the time studying or read the same text several times over if you need to memorize the information. How should you start learning? Well, the fastest way is to download or buy software which teaches you speed reading. These programs also test your comprehension levels after the reading session and can give you statistics on your performance and any improvements you might have registered.

Why Google And Wikipedia Can Be Your Textbooks

If you’re like most students, you probably rely on the internet a lot to research for papers and presentations. But what about when you’re studying for a test? Or answering questions on a worksheet? Or if you’re just plain confused about a subject?

Don’t be afraid to look outside of your classroom for information or clarification on what you’re learning.

Knowledge is universal!

Unless you’re a graduate student studying cutting edge discoveries in your field, the stuff you’re learning about is probably pretty basic for that subject. There have been thousands of books, articles, and lectures covering Econ 101. Where do you think your textbook and instructor are getting their information? Unless your prof is making it up, they are getting their information from the same sources that you can find on the internet: scholarly journals, encyclopedias, news media, etc.

You should seek to learn instead of memorize. When you really get that point ingrained in your noggin, you won’t need to rely on your textbooks and teachers as much.

Finding answers on the internet is sometimes faster than searching through your textbook.

Have you ever come across a term in your textbook that just made you think, “What the $@%# does that mean?” and then spent half an hour paging through that textbook to find the definition of this word?

Try typing the word into Google, and you might be surprised that the first result is a dictionary definition or Wikipedia entry about that exact term.

Wikipedia is about as accurate as any other encyclopedia.

I know most teachers treat Wikipedia like the red-headed stepchild of encyclopedias, but it really is good! A study in 2005 found that Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica had about the same amount of errors.

Whether Wikipedia is an authoritative source of information for your research paper is a subject for another article. But when you’re just looking for understanding on a subject, Wikipedia rules.

Textbooks can suck at explaining stuff.

A lot of textbooks are just plain horrible at helping the reader understand the subject. If you’re reading a chapter that’s just really dense and hard to understand, hop onto Google and see what you can find.

Getting information phrased in many different ways will help you to understand the topic. You might have to read several different explanations until you find one that is written in a way that “works” for you.

Then there are those damn bold faced words. Some textbooks like to drop a ton of fancy technical terms on you and then give you a one sentence definition in the back of the book explaining it. Sometimes a one-sentence definition of a word just isn’t enough to understand what the heck they are talking about! If you want a little more clarification, look it up online.

There are all kinds of websites especially made for students of various subjects

You might be able to find a full-blown website that’s devoted to helping students of a specific subject. If not, a lot of professors will put their notes and lectures online for their students to read. These are really easy to find through Google.