517 Flexibility
In this chapter you will learn:- how to use your skills more flexibly to get the best out of your
abilities; - how to capture more of your most creative ideas;
- how to make better use of your mind’s potential in your essays.
At this point it’s worth making the first of a number of concerted
appeals for flexibility in your pattern of study.
We’re all concerned with getting the best out of our abilities. Indeed
most of us have abilities we haven’t even used before. In order to get
at these, you’ve probably experimented with different ways of planning
your essays to find a method that suits you. But the key to it is to be
flexible. Choose note-taking, planning and reading strategies that are
appropriate for the job you have to do. This way you will find the right
key that will unlock your abilities. Don’t just stick to one strategy that
you’ve always used even though you know it isn’t always as much help
as you would like it to be.
For example, if you were on holiday and your car broke down in an
unfamiliar region of the country, and you decided to look in the Yellow
Pagesfor the phone number of a local mechanic, it would not be the
most effective reading strategy to begin at page one and read word-
for-word through the rest of the book. Obviously, you would scan the
pages for the right information. This is sensible, but when we tackle
similar tasks in our studies we tend to stick to the familiar, reliable
method of word-for-word reading, that we’ve always used for every
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