How to Write Better Essays

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10 Changing our pattern of study

In this chapter you will learn:

• about the causes of many of our most common study skills
  problems;


• about the need to change our pattern of study.

In the light of these changed assumptions about the purpose of learn-

ing tasks like essay writing, it should be obvious that we now need

a new pattern of study – we need to use our study skills differently,

more appropriately for the tasks we’re set. If we don’t, if we retain the

assumption that education is exclusively about ‘knowing things’, then

certain things will follow. We will be cursed with the sort of problems

of which most of us are all too aware.

Common problems

Note-taking

In our note-taking we will continue to argue, quite reasonably on

these misplaced assumptions, that when we take notes in tutorials,

seminars and lectures, or from the source material we use for research,

we cannot leave anything out, because these are the facts, the right

answers, and if we omit them we will not have all the facts we need

to pass the examination. As a result we take vast quantities of

verbatim notes. Even worse, they’re unstructured, because all we’re

doing is recording them accurately – we’re not processing them in any

way for fear of getting them wrong.

Consequently, we’re left with masses of unusable notes, most of

them irrelevant to the questions we’re going to have to answer in the

examination. This presents us with the most daunting of problems,

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