For those who have difficulty assimilating what they read and organizing all the content they are studying, the Abstract technique can be a great ally to improve your synthesis and understanding.
Many people find it easier to remember what they see and that is why their memory is called “visual”. Anyone with a visual memory should emphasize summaries, images, graphics and colors used in all of these. Highlighting a text in red, for example, will help you to select a certain part as important and your memory will quickly grasp it.
Making a summary of each subject studied is of great help during the exam time. Instead of having to study the entire content again the day before, just look at your summaries and you'll soon remember all the adjacent information. For this reason, it is essential that the abstract is written in your own words, to help you remember the content as soon as you read your summary.
Charts and diagrams can also help to create relationships between meanings. This is a good tip for those who have "whites" at the time of the test. By creating such relationships, as soon as you forget one piece of information, your brain makes the link with other information on the same subject. In this way, ideas flow naturally, like a self-memory resource.
Therefore, when making summaries, it is necessary to exercise your capacity for synthesis and objectivity. Keywords are part of the best ways to produce them. It's no use making links with huge texts, because later it will be difficult to correlate them with other information. The keywords contain only those information that are really important, which make connections in your brain with other equally important information about the content you have already studied.
The same goes for literary book summaries. Copying the abstract from the internet may even let you know about the history of the book, but it won't allow you to understand the book as a whole. The ideal is to read the book, write your own summary and then read someone else's summary. This way you will be able to clarify doubts and have access to the analysis of the books under a literary vision, understanding the environment in which the work was produced.
By Marla Rodrigues
Brazil School Team
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Study Tips - Brazil School
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SCHOOL, Team Brazil. "Summaries"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/dicas-de-estudo/resumos.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
