Summarising your work Revision techniques
Writing a clear summary of what you’ve studied helps in two ways: it makes you understand the material better, and it gives you a short version you can read again before your exam.
Summary tables
Use tabular summaries to gather various pieces of information. Summary tables are an effective revision technique and a great way to compare or evaluate competing theories, grammatical rules or examples of themes in different parts of your study material. You can use a table like the ones shown below. Change the number of columns or rows for your own work, but keep them fairly simple so you can remember them in the exam.
Tabular summaries are extremely valuable because they convert broad themes and the detailed discussions into a more manageable form.
| Block 1 | Block 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Theme 1 | ||
| Theme 2 |
| Strengths | Weaknesses | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theory 1 | |||
| Theory 2 | |||
| Theory 3 |
Reviewing your study notes and working out which topics might require more detailed revision work is an important part of the the revision process.
To get started with revision I normally revisit my notes from the module. I'll check if there's any area that I haven't made a lot of notes, if any perhaps. Or the areas where I have got copious notes I'll start to cut them down, and so you end up with a smaller volume of the more specific points.
Student, Ged's, advice for revising
Try creating a tabular summary of an overarching topic by following these steps.
- Summarise your notes on the topic from the various sources you have collected together.
- Draw together the main points from these notes, using headings and key points.
- Try to reduce these notes further to one side of A4 paper, using only the main headings and a few associated key words.
Index cards
Notes on index cards are particularly handy as you can carry them with you and review them in odd moments or for testing yourself - perhaps on a train or bus, or while waiting in a queue in the supermarket.
Summarise your topic in a few words. Using your own words means you process the information, which improves your understanding and your memory. Keep the notes brief to act as prompts.
Organise your notes in new ways on the cards, perhaps providing an overview of a topic on one, and then notes around sub-topics on others. Try using colour as an aid to memory.
Use your assignments
Assignments can be a very useful starting point for producing summaries. Look through them and reduce the assignment by making summary sheets or cards for use in your revision. As you do so, compare exam and assignment questions on the same topic. How do the questions differ? What would the differences be (if any) between an assignment and exam answer on the same topic?
You might find that 'Outline view', if you use Microsoft Word, helps you to quickly scan through Word documents and find useful material. Using styles, outlines and table of contents in Microsoft Word.
