You Too Can Study More Easily: Tips for Dummies and Others

By Kevin Bucknall

Advice to students on how to improve study methods; this is of relevance to both high school and university students

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Bucknall
• Release date: Apr 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780956182326

Kevin Bucknall

I have worked at London University, Griffith University (Australia) and with the United Nations in Bangkok. I have lived in a variety of countries, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the UK. Recently I spend much of my time writing about motivation and study skills and also making videos about Chinese and Japanese culture. I also "entertain" the neighbours by practising the clarinet in order to keep my place as the lowliest clarinet player in the Da Capo concert band in London.

Book preview

You Too Can Study More Easily: Tips for Dummies and Others

By Kevin Bucknall

Copyright 2012 Kevin Bucknall

Published by Kewei Press at Smashwords

ISBN 978-0-9561823-2-6

The cover painting is The Young Student by Ozias Leduc (1864-1955), Quebec, Canada

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 How to increase your motivation and tackle procrastination

Chapter 2 Improve your marks in exams: the meaning of commonly used words

Chapter 3 Ten top tips for revising for exams

Chapter 4 How to do better with data response questions

Chapter 5 Advice for mature students

Chapter 6 Tips for doing research

Chapter 7 Free sample from the book Going to University: the Secrets of Success

Chapter 8 Other books by this author

Chapter 9 Videos by this author

Introduction

This book contains six articles that are designed to help you study better, quicker, and more easily—then to do better in exams, data-response questions or research. When you study more efficiently you will find that you will either have more time left over to do the things you really like doing; or else you will score better marks which will help you to get to the university you really want to attend or you will get a better class degree if you are already at Uni. The other possible outcome is to gain a mixture of both, that is to say more free time and better marks all round.

In short, if you study efficiently you both save time and do better, both desirable in life. The poet had a point when he said Youth’s a stuff will not endure so better make the most of it!

One word of warning: we are all individuals and some respond better to some recommendations than others. I suggest that you try all the advice and stick with those bits that work best for you. But do give the suggestions a fair trial as some can take time to pay off. In a few cases this might be a term (or semester) or two.

The advice here is based on almost thirty years of teaching in universities and tutoring for university entrance exams. This means that it is tried and tested and, most importantly, practical and easy to follow. You will not find here rather uncommon words such as heuristic (learning by solving problems for yourself, doing it by trial and error, or experimenting on your own). I am a believer in KISS, not only as a noun that applies to me personally but also as an acronym for Keep it simple, stupid! Well, I’ve done my best.

Some of the EBook readers currently available do not properly handle bullet points. In fact some of them do really crazy things to the bullets and are not always internally consistent. For that reason I decided to use asterisks rather than bullet points in this EBook.

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Chapter 1 How to increase your motivation and tackle procrastination

An external stimulus, such as a teacher telling you to get on with it, might encourage you to try a bit harder but is rarely as powerful as self motivation. If you are to do well in life, finding ways of increasing your own motivation is a key element. By increasing your level of motivation we mean developing or increasing your desire to work harder in order to achieve your needs, wants, goals and ambition. In other words, you are trying to increase your enthusiasm and drive. If you are to succeed at this you must really want to do better and not merely feel that it would be a good thing if you did. You are going to have to make an effort and introduce some permanent changes in your life. It is not likely to work well if you only try for one week then stop and expect that things will be different and better from now on.

When dieting to lose weight, or when giving up a drug habit, if you are to succeed you need a change of lifestyle. Stopping for a short time and hoping this will be enough tends to result in failure. In the end, one just drifts back into old habits and the problem returns. Similarly, if you want to increase your long-term motivation it means a permanent change in some aspects of your lifestyle. You will have to develop willpower and gain new attitudes to help you develop the determination to achieve. There are many tips listed below but do not let the size of the list daunt you. If you try only one or two tools to improve yourself and stick to them you should find that you gradually do better and achieve more. So never be afraid to start.

Going for you, is that once you develop an increased taste for learning, it becomes a habit and can become a desirable thing to do in itself. So it is easier to stick with the new regime and not slip back into routine aimlessness. When you decide to work on improving your motivation to study and learn, you can see this as an investment in your own future; you will be choosing to do something now that might be a bit difficult and then reaping the payoff down the line and of course forever.

You can also see this as a trade-off. You are giving up some of your present time and ways of spending it in order to make the decision to study. In return you will get much more valuable things in the future: the income, the good job, a high standard of living, running your own firm, enjoying the freedom that wealth can bring, or whatever you would like in life. These future things are more valuable to you—you selected them after all—than what you are giving up. This almost makes it a no-brainer. All you need is to put in the effort and keep on putting it in. Once your new ways become a habit, then less effort will be needed and you might be able to cruise to success.

There are many tools, described below, that can help motivate you. However, we are all individuals and not everyone responds in the same way to pressures and events. Of the many different ways of trying to increase self-motivation, some will work better for you, others less so, and some perhaps not at all. I suggest you try all the different tools below, or at least as many as appeal. Then concentrate on those that work for you. They are unlikely to be exactly the same as those that work for your best friend but this does not matter at all.

First, Your Long-term Motivation

There are two main approaches to increase your self-motivation: these consist of the traditional stick and carrot. The stick consists of