How to: Summary of the summary technique

UPSC is not just about 3 R's. First is reading. Reading wide and deep. The second R is about remembering what you read. There is no point if you can not remember key points of what you have read. And the third R about reproducing. If I read a load of books but I am not able to recall anything then it is virtually useless. Therefore, the art of remembering and reproducing becomes very crucial in such a competitive framework.

For this reason, we discussed the five-point approach of making a summary of articles or issues. However, even this gets very bulky by the time we complete one or two years in the process. Therefore, it is advisable to use the summary of the summary approach for this purpose. This would help a person in remembering the maximum amount of information and reproducing it quickly in the exam. It is particularly helpful when we are reading some optional content or bulky book chapter from history or polity.

In this, on your first reading, make a summary of any chapter. For your second or third reading, refer to this summary instead of jumping into notes. If a person is not able to recall the original content then he should refer to original notes. Once this summary is covered 2 to 3 times, then you should keep aside this summary and a separate summary sheet should be compiled where you can only list various headings, abstracting out details and putting diagrams and specifically things which you are finding difficult to remember.

In this way, one should go on minimizing the bulkiness of file of summary sheets. Eventually, the whole book would be compressed in few pages which one can skim over before the exam in few hours and appear in the exam with full confidence. This approach is specifically useful for people who appear repetitively in the exam. And if they are not aware, then unconsciously they will end up doing this only.