STARTING WITH AN OVERVIEW

Hopefully, you have been taking good notes on class lectures and discussions, and have been annotating in your books all along. This helps tremendously. Gather your materials and find a big table or workspace free of distractions. (Those study tables in the library are ideal.) Take a few minutes to read through your notes and annotations just to refresh your memory about the major topics covered in class. Go back and read through the weekly schedule. Sometimes this really helps you get the big-picture view.

For instance, let’s say you are taking a midterm in your English class. You’ve read seven or eight articles at this point. You can barely remember the titles or authors, much less see the big picture of how they all fit together. An hour spent skimming them and reviewing your annotations may reveal the common threads or themes or issues that you couldn’t see when you read the articles one at a time. It’s likely the essay exam will ask you to synthesize this information, so you have to be able to see the connections between the readings. Rereading the questions that accompany each reading is also extremely useful.