My approach of note making

✴️✨When you start writing notes of a subject, without getting atleast minimum level understanding of the content, on the resources you read, then a new book will be formed from the existing one.✨✴️

It's two months by now, one of my student(UPSC aspirant) called me and asked, "Ma'am I am finding hard to write notes when reading to NCERT and standard books.. Feeling every point as important, not knowing how to pick the specific points.. Would please suggest me on what can be done to come out of my problem?" In reply I said," I will suggest you the approach which I followed. This particular approach not only helped me but also it worked for many of my students ". 

Here is the approach :

Step 1: When you choose a book, first consider the preparation chapter wise.

Step 2: Read every chapter 3 times.

*In first read, don't try to remember anything, read it as fast as possible.

*In second read, go in the flow of comfortable speed in which you understand the topic. Here try to get in depth understanding of every passage of the chapter. If you find that you didn't understand any of the passage then read that particular one until you understand.. 

*Now in the third reading, hopefully you can get a clear idea of what the content is being described about. At this point of time, you underline the contents which you are finding hard to remember.

Step 3: In general, we have more tendency to forget the naming words, dates(or years). Note them at one place. Apart from them try to bring out an opinion on the gist of every topic of the chapter and then note down in your own words and in a simple way such that you should ease to recollect the things on reading your notes. This approach seems to be time consuming, but still it saves you lots of time in your upcoming preparation.

At the end of the day, it's not about how many times you read; it's all about how well you are able to understand the content. I have done everything thrice, as after my post graduation, I am with years of preparation with respect to Engineering subjects for teaching and also in preparation for competitive exams, so initially when I started my preparation, I used to find it hard to connect with UPSC subjects instantly. So I adopted this approach. But, if you are comfortable with understanding the content in the first read ,you can directly note down the naming words, years and gist of the content then itself

On a whole, reading without understanding something, will not fetch you results. It will not also consume a lot of your precious time but also affects your preparation in long run. As one chapter is interlinked with other chapter and also one subject is interlinked with other subject. So first itself spend enough of time in learning the content until you understand and able Without getting proper understanding on what you read and try to write notes, almost every point seems to be important and certainly you write a new book from the existing book. 

This is the approach I shared to her.. After one month of implementation, she gave me response to my way of note making. She told that this approach helped her so much.. So felt sharing my approach here which helped me and also for many of my students...