#instead of just doing your new (smaller!) section you wanna have me re-do the whole thing

[nico-inc]

"Why am I moved to a new shelving assignment?" idk bc i was told I was now in charge of making the new one and no one has told me how to do it "Could I just have my old assignment back?" so I can re-arrange everyone instead of you just doing your job? sure queen thanks

[replaykoo]

📁 ᨳ how I study in college :

⠀˒⠀ methods and tipps that might be helpful

# contents

taking notes

organizing your note

reading texts

how to structure a study session

useful apps

more

𖥻 taking notes

I guess the most important thing when studying is how to take your notes. I know there are quite many note taking methods and I’ve tried a few of them (like the one where you section your paper in two collums etc) but usually they just didn’t rly work for me and made things more complicated.

So the question you have to ask yourself is why you even take notes ! Usually that’s for write down key elements from a textbook, lecture etc to remember them later. And for that your notes should be simple, structured and easy to read/understand. A big chunk of words won’t rly help you (imo)

So here’s how I do it. I take „smart notes“. (learned that method from a yt video by mariana‘s study corner). You basically translate bigger ideas/concepts into single sentences. (Or multiple grammatically easy ones). The key is just to make them as simple as possible so you can quickly read over them and understand what the concept explains.

so I keep my sentences simple

one sentence per line / bullet point

I do use → , =, + or similar symbols to add mini sentences and show connections

𖥻 organizing your notes

I’d say if you can, it’s best to take your notes digitally. It’s easy to move things around and re-organize, keep things in sections/categories and you can ofc edit it afterwards if you need to. My fav programm is OneNote bcs you can make great folders, sections, books, sub-pages etc. But notion is also a great alternative (both are free)

I personally have my notes sorted like this :

- major

- minor

course 1

course 2

course 3

lesson week 1

lesson week 2

→ lecture (notes)

→ lecture powerpoint/ dossier

→ literature + notes

→ questions I have or additional info the teacher gave during the q&a session

I’m sure there are many other great organizing systems but this one works quite good for me so far.

𖥻 reading texts

When reading from textbook or just texts that have structured paragraphs I always read the paragraph FIRST and highlight the key word(s) later. This is rly useful if yours someone who tends to just highlight the whole page. It forces you to think about what the key word/concept was. (With paragraphs I mean about 10-ish sentences. Doing any more is kinda a waste of time bcs you’ll have to go back all the time. So keep the chunks small)

While reading & highlighting I don’t take my notes yet. I finish a sub-chapter or topic and then go back and take my notes (like explained above) I find this useful bcs you’ll already know more about the concept/topic when you’re taking your notes, instead of just summarizing the text as you go.

𖥻 how to structure a study session

For study I use the pomodoro technique. You study for 25 min, then take a 5 min break. Then study again, break, study, break .... After 4 study sessions you can take a longer break (15min)

To plan my weeks/days I made a weekly schedule for myself where I marked live lectures/zoom webinars, when I watch lecture recordings, read my literature, do weekly assignments & exercises, study sessions, weekly deadlines and just stuff that usually happens weekly. Since my college is 90% online I can plan all my time as I want to so I made my own schedule.

If you have exams upcoming it’s also a great idea to make a study plan. For that I take a monthly overview and mark my exams BiG in a specific color. Then in the sams color I write down what exercises etc I wanna do each day. (Make sure to mark these smaller or in a different way than the exam so it’s super obvious when the exam will be ans you don’t get confused) If you have multiple exams in a short period this method is super useful. Use different colors for each subject/course

I used to make these on paper (and not digitally) so I just made myself a 7:4 grid and marked the days. I colored the exam day all in the color of the subject. For the study notes each day I just highlighted them in the specific color

𖥻 useful apps & websites

For the pomodoro technique I mentioned earlier I use a website called pomofucus.io ! It’s basically a timer

I also heard a lot about this app called forest ! It’s a study timer that helps you to stay focused and off your phone. It costs 2$ tho

For my weekly plan I use the free google calendar ! You can make color codes categories and the design is rly nice in my opinion.

If you need to study vocabulary I can only recommend quizlet !! They have an app & website both free. I’ve been using it for >6 years and it’s helped me so much through highschool. It has different study modes like flashcards, learning-mode, quiz etc. You can also study sets that other people made, so if you wanna study just some random vocab you can look through these. I’ve found some of the textbooks I used so this saved me quite some time.

Also don’t underestimate study or 101 YouTube channels. I usually looked for some explanation YouTube videos for subjects like physics or chemistry and they always helped me a lot.

𖥻 more

I know sometimes you jsut don’t feel like sitting down to study. Studying is hard sometimes. But procrastinating isn’t the solution. Just think about how you’ll feel the next day. If you put off your work on the next day that means you HAVE TO DO IT the next day. But do you think you’ll be more motivated the next day? Probably not, right ... So just do the work as soon as possible. Your future self will thank you.

𖥻 ending notes

So, I hope you could learn a big from this. These are in no way perfect methods but I think they’re quite practical and helpful. Also feel free to comment if you know other great methods !! I’m always open to try out new stuff c:

Let me know if you liked this guide and what other things you’d like to see on my blog ◡̈

໑ see you next time ✧ またね ഒ

[nny11writes]

1, 33 and 48 for the writers ask meme? :)

1. Tell us about your WIP!

Oh god which one?????? Fic I’m currently get good writing in on and excited about is How to Quit You which is already posting but not finished. Buuuuut, I think I want to talk a hot second more about the dang Art Model AU that jumped me in a back alley. One of my friends has a story she’s writing/planning for a different fandom (Power Rangers: Jungle Fury!) and we were hashing through her idea that one of the characters was an art model back in college and he took his crush to an art gallery where a nude of him was hung up.  I liked it! And then weeks go back by, maybe months, and suddenly all I can think is, “How fucking hilarious would it be if Adora was an art model? Like, she’s not ashamed of her body or nudity, she’s not bothered by the process or images of her being put out into the art world.” and then the very next thought was, “We all like hc Catra as an artist in Modern AUs, oh my god she could be the disaster lesbian she is!”

And now I’m a few thousand words into it and Adora has started attending the drawing sessions when she’s not a model with a cheap drug store “art book” and her mechanical pencil she chewed to death. Because she’s fallen for the mean artist and wants to impress her she has a genuine interest in learning how to draw even if everything she puts on paper looks like a misshapen potato.

I’m going to force them to ride in the car while Animotion’s Obsession plays on the radio and they both break out into a sweat.

(Warning for that song, it’s one of those “oh this is so catchy, but I can’t hear lyrics when listening to new songs” and then I looked it up and it’s a bit date rapey. Like, why do so many 80′s tunes I like end up really skeevey?)

33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like?

I would hesitate to say I even have an actual process for revisions and rewrites. Basically, every time I open my doc to work I always go back to the start of the chapter I’m working on and re-read until I hit where I need to write.

This gets me in the right head space for the fic, helps me remember what the characters are doing/plot, and nail down the same tone in my writing.

But it also means that every time I write I do a bit of editing before hand. Heck, if I need to re-read an older chapter or skip ahead to a later one to double check consistency I’ll do some editing /while/ I’m writing as well.

Because I tend to look at one fic then a different one then a different one, with no consistent schedule it ends up being the great advice of write it and walk away. Come back a day or two later and look at it again because you’ll see more errors that way.

I think this isn’t the best system for most people. A lot of folks need some separation between writing and editing so that they don’t hamstring themselves via perfectionism. I’ve been learning over the last year that I’m, in fact, not a fat lazy bastard like I’ve always thought I was. I am, in fact, a fat overachieving hype-man. Which is wild! So I know I fall into that trap sometimes too.

Great example is Chapter 18 of how to quit you, I wrote the chapter, edited that for about two or three months, then realized it was really not good and deleted it to start over, edited that for a few weeks and realized it’s still not right. So I might need to delete it again but I’m going to try and fix it via smaller section re-writes and adjusting what I thought I wanted plot wise. But what chapter isn’t finished and is next to be posted? Chapter 11. Fucking, god damn it all. Almost every chapter from 11-14 has been heavily ignored despite needing to be in the story and being good I just can’t get my brain to work. So instead I get stuck editing and editing and editing and not WRITING.

On the other hand, I tend to bulldog it and then when I do ask people to edit/beta read there’s not as much obvious stuff that they have to slog through since I’ve caught most of my common spelling mistakes (-ign instead of -ing will kill me some day), tense mistakes, and consistency errors.

I like doing it this way, and while it can get it the way it normally helps. But again...it’s not exactly planned out. I just launch into a fic and go “cool I wanna write something for this fic” and I’m not a chronological writer so god speed little dude.

48. Do you prefer to write skimpy drafts and flesh them out later, or write too much and cut it back?

I mean, kinda like I talked about above I tend to edit and polish parts of my draft while still actively writing other parts of it. Like, with the same chapter and across the whole fic.

I honestly fall into both categories because I’m somewhat of a blend of them. I lean more towards expanding on what I’ve already written but I don’t tend to write super skimpy drafts that need actual fleshing out.

I do love [I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS BUT TRANSITIONS ARE MAGIC] for areas I have a vague idea about, but there’s usually fully fleshed out scenes on either side of it. It’s just when I’m doing the editing to write thing that I’ll sometimes go, “Oh, wait, this would be much more impactful if I expanded a bit more.” So a one off line about Obi-Wan realizing that Palpatine ordered Maul to kill Qui Gon and is trying to corrupt Anakin, became a third of a chapter that I felt was really well rounded already both before and after that moment. Or a short paragraph about Glimmer and Catra riding back into work devolved into them teasing one another and got some good descriptions in (I’m so bad at describing physical things in stories, so that one line about Catra’s cheeks looking like hibiscus from her blushing was fucking god tier for me), and all the sudden I didn’t just have a short transition area, I had a full blown scene. (Thank you again dontcallmebugaboo for listening to me ramble about how the transition sucked and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and you just said “romantic horse ride” and the clouds fucking parted, ilu) The most COMMON version of this is when Characters Suddenly Take Over and completely derail my story. Because then as I look around I go, “Hey yeah that could work, but I need a chapter about A and then need to seed in more references to B before I can expand on C.”  

So idk is the short answer lol. I tend to write things out as I go along and every so often I get jumped in a dark alleyway.