We have discussed in couple of previous post about importance of making notes from the newspaper. However story does not end there. People face huge dilemma about the correct manner of notes making. Some frequently asked questions are:
Q. Should I make notes in separate registers or one combined register for everything?
Q. Should I cut the newspaper articles or extract points from them?
Q. Should I maintain notes indexed by topic or indexed by dates?
Firstly, the notes making from newspaper is only the first step. The real juice lies in the constant revision. You may read loads of books but if you do not revise them regularly, It's of no use. Remember the Ebinghaus findings I mentioned. You remember hardly 3% of what you have read after 24 hours if you do not consolidate those thoughts in your brain once again.
Now, the point of making separate register or combined register. Here the answer would be "depends on how much comfortable you are managing multiple registers". Are you ok with reading a news and then finding the corresponding register and putting the newsitem therein? I was never comfortable with this appraoch. Therefore, I used to maintain one combined register for all the topics. However, I used to maintain separate registers for separate months.
Keeping separate registers like one for science and technology, other for polity and national issues, other for economics, one more for social issues has following pros and cons.
One, you will be able to access news item quickly.
Second, revision from the register becomes easy because all the newsitems of one domain are gathererd in one register.
However the negative side is also quite heavy.
It takes a lot of patience to read the news, search for the appropriate register and put news in there.
Sometimes, one newsitem may belong to various topics of syllabus. For example a topic of labour issues and education may fall under socil issues as well as economics. Where would you like to put it now?
Keeping a combined register for everything can help us in overcoming the dilemma of where to put the newwsitem.It may increase our efficiencey of newspaper reading because we don't have to go search for different registers.Often the search time to pick corresponding register acts as an interruption. However, it comes with a downside wherein you may find it difficult to find a newsitem.
To overcome this and to make newspaper notes more interconnected, I devised a new strategy. This strategy draws from the positive of both the strategies and completely remove the negative. This may look cumbersome for the first timer but ocne into it, there is nothing like it. The whole year long current affairs will be on your tips and you will end up revising the whole current affairs 2 to 3 times without even opening your registers. I will try to explain this with a seven step process. This strategy requires us to maintain monthly register for current affairs of each month and one index register where wee have listed all the topics of our mains examination.
Step 1: Make a new register for each month
Step 2: Number all the pages of this register
Step 3: Assign a code to each register. For example J for January, F for February, M for March likewise.
Step 4: Leave some space on the sides of each page
Step 5: Start each day with a fresh page
Step 6: Read the newsitem and write the notes in the corresponding month register catalogued by the date
Now a curious fellow may ask, why to do all this? The rationale behind this is "now you can access every item with the code". So a newsitem of january 21 written on page number 34 can be accessed with code J2134. Similarly a item of Feb 5 on page number 101 may be accessed by the code F05101.
and now the final step:
Step 7: Buy a 10 rupee short notebook, number it's pages and allocate one page for one topic of mains. I shall provide the list of topics in the next blog.
Now when you are reading the newspaper, all you have to do is pick up the monthly register and make an entry of your notes on the relevant newsitem. Once done with this, think about various heads under which this newsitem may fall. So for example, A news of "Increasing unemployability of educated people in the labour market due to fake degree colleges" may be tagged as education and labour reforms. Similarly, a newsitem on the "Railway sending a water train to Latur to deal with drought" may be tagged as Railway, water, Agriculture, Farmer issues and so on.
This kind of reflection helps in strong retention and consolidation of the topics. And it provides better granularity of indexing your item.
Once you are done reading the newspaper, close it and forget. Whenever you are making the first revision, devote some time to make an entry to the small 10 rupee notebook. Follow the following steps,
Step 1: Choose any one of the prominent tag. Let us say we pick labour in this case and the tag was J0112 that is this item is listed on January one, page number 12.
Step 2: Open the labour page and make a one line entry J0112 along with the most prominent 2 pts of the newsitem.
Step 3: Do this exercise for all the newsitems which you revise for the first time.
Now let us say when you are making nth entry to this register, you can easily revise the previous n-1 items without having to open the main register. Just a cursory look at the item will activate your brain circuits and will help you in interlinking and revising. For instance, the whole issue of labor can be captured in few seconds. This provides a full bird-eye-view of the macro topic of labor.
Whenever, you want to make a second revision before the exam, you simply have to open the ten rupee indexed register and you will be done in very short time. Whenever, you are making a new entry, you will involuntarily end up revising all the previous newsitems related to this topic from this page.
Therefore, the answer to the question of " Should I make notes in separate registers or one combined register for everything" is "maintain monthly register, index them by dates and tag them by topics of mains examination, maintain a separate small portable ten rupee register where access code of each item is listed under the tag page".
Give it a try for 15 days. Trust me you'll find it much more productive and engaging than the monotonus and bulky exercise of maintaining different registers. Few advantages of this approach are following:
1. You have a finer level indexing by the mains topics. So instead of dividing the notes in five domains of social issues, science and technology, polity of national issues, Now you have divided the whole thing by 100 topics.
2. It helps you immensely in the revision which is the main objective.
3. It makes you newspaper reading efficient so you don't have to choose in which register to put the newsitem.
4. The reflection on what categories this item may fall in helps in further consolidation and deveelop critical thinking.
This also answers the third question of "Should I maintain notes indexed by topic or indexed by dates?". Now you have items indexed by topics as well as dates. You can choose whichever way you wish to revise. Moreover, all you have to do is carry this short notebook along with you wherever you go and open any random page. In less than five minutes, you will have enough insight on the topic that you would be able to speak extempore on the contemporary issues for hours and hours.
Now comes the second qeustion which is "Should I cut the newspaper articles or extract points from them?".
In my experience, most of the time, if we cut paste the news item, we often end up reading the full item again and again on each revision. Therefore, I always preferred to extract some five key points from the article and dump the newspaper. However, some of my friend find it too abstract and face difficulties in recalling the context of news when it comes to revision.
The key lies in how do you extract the points. For Some benchmark articles from renonwned scholars like Amartay Sen or M.S. Swaminathan, it is better to cut and paste the entire article because mostly every line of such article is relevant. It assumes greater importance because it directly comes from horses mouth. For some big article, if you feel lazy or article is so important then one may cut paste the whole thing. However, if you are cut-pasting an article then make sure that you underline and number the important points of the newsitem. Otherwise, it is often unproductive.
This much for the day. Will write about many other substantial things and interesting aspect of making your civil services preparation enjoyable without a girlfriend or without alcohol.
Till then, Good bye. Have to check grammar also
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