Thursday, December 29, 2011

How can I enjoy reading non fiction textbooks, despite being an avid reader for fiction?

I love reading, but predominantly books I read are fiction-based. I don't really hold interest in non fiction textbooks, but I wish I did so I can expand on my knowledge and increase my scores on exams. So how can I learn to enjoy reading textbooks like physics? Thanks!|||Non-fiction textbooks won't be as enjoyable as fiction; it's just true. There isn't so much of a cure for it as a way to cope with it. So you have to get yourself to sit down in a place where you won't be distracted. For me, it means leaving my laptop behind and heading to my college's food court or library. If you own the book take a pen and underline %26amp; jot notes in the margins. If not, you can use pencil, take a notebook and jot a few things down, or use sticky notes to mark important pages. You don't necessarily need comprehensive notes, although it depends on the way your teacher uses the book (or doesn't...I've had teachers that make you spend $50 on a book and never bother to actually teach to it). The point is just that you have to engage with the text in order to get anything out of it. If you only "read" it, you'll wind up staring into space and forgetting everything you learned. Instead, challenge yourself to think about what you're reading and consider what is important about it.





Sometimes, it also helps to give yourself a time frame. I make it my goal to finish a particular chapter or section from around 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Sometimes I meet it and sometimes I don't, but having that period set aside to read makes me try a little harder than if I just sat down with a book and told myself to read it. I also tried a thing where I calculated the amount of time it took me to read a full page of text and timed myself for each page. It got me to read faster and to focus a little better because I kept wanting to beat my time of 2 minutes per page. However, it seems to work on some books better than others, and there's no benefit to reading so fast that you obtain no information; that just makes you spend double the time going back and reading it again.





My last bit of wisdom (*snicker) is that chart-making is fun and helpful. Whether or not you actually use the chart later on, it's fun to make one and it helps you keep track of the information. I'm an archaeology major, so I have a whole chart about the Maya deities, what they did, and how they were represented in art. For biology, I made a chart of taxonomies and also for geological time scales. And for history, I have a timeline stretching back from 550 BCE to around 1300 CE. I've never taken a physics class, so I can't say how charts would help exactly, but I will say that they're a good tool; you're learning as you do it, engaging with the text, and organizing your information in a way that's accessible later, when the exams come.





Hope you enjoyed my rather long-winded rant. More importantly, I hope that was helpful!|||TextbookTime.com makes it easy to save money on college textbooks, used textbooks, cheap textbooks and digital textbooks you need. TextbookTime.com has the most used textbooks on the planet, the largest selection of digital textbooks and ebooks and the fastest shipping. http://www.TextbookTime.com

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|||Well...good luck with that. I know it's difficult. I actually took some classes that looked really interesting and thought perhaps the textbooks would be as well (they were not).



Perhaps if you can take something from physics, say a theory, etc. and you put it in terms of something that interests you, this would help you to retain the information more easily. For example, when someone isn't good at math and/or fractions (but they love food), you use M%26amp;M's or other food to show them first-hand how to add, subtract, or make a problem into a fraction. I know it might be difficult to do this, especially in trying to fit something with whatever law, theory, method, etc. that you're trying to learn. Say if you're interested in weather, you could see how physics and weather coincide and again retain the knowledge more easily.



Another thing you could do is that if there's a certain area that you need to remember, you could make a slogan out of it, kind of like people who want to remember music scales use EGBDF: Elvis' guitar broke down Friday. I know that this is something that especially helped me in Geometry and Biology.



Hopefully, you'll find a way to enjoy your class and improve your grades.|||Picture the thing ur reading in real life, just change it a bit so it's more interesting to watch, I read about the civil war and I pictured people fighting with ketchup and mustard

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