Welcome to LearnLawBetter where today you are going to learn how to create an outline
from a book where you know nothing about the material.
When you practice this new skill, you will read and understand books much faster than
you do today.
Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today we are going to discuss how to approach a non-fiction book
and then how to prepare an outline from the book.
Before we jump into this discussion, I want to say thank you to Chris, who suggested this
topic in the comments section of my YouTube channel.
Now, when most students read an assignment from a book, here's what they do,
They pull out the book, and they look at the assignment, which says pages 39 to 47.
So they go and then they read the pages. That's what most of us do
unless you learn how to read a book better.
When you start reading the assignment in those pages, have you ever asked yourself
what you were about to read? Probably not.
Students will of course know the title of the course, and maybe even know topic, but
they probably will not have a good sense of what they will be covering
for that particular assignment or for that matter, for the course.
So let me give you some steps to help you learn how to read books better.
Step number one is to review the
table of contents and that will help you understand what the book is about, where the author is going,
and how the author is getting there.
You need to do this so that you can start developing your own schema for the course,
which will help you categorize and understand the material better.
Now after you review the table of contents, I strongly recommend that you then use the
table as your outline.
If this is new material for you then you don’t have a starting point.
Presumably the book’s author is an expert and has categorized the material in a systematic
manner.
Now, if at some point during the course you find a better way of organizing the material,
then by all means make changes then.
But at the beginning, the table of contents is a great organizational tool to help you start your
outlining.
Step number two in the process is to look at the index.
The index will help provide you with all sorts of great information
that will give you a sense of where the author is going,
what are the key terms, how much does he cover certain material.
All this is very valuable information that will help you learn the law better.
Step three, go to each chapter in the book and see if the author has provided a chapter
summary at the beginning or end of the chapter.
Many books have this kind of summary information, so read it so you will have a sense of
what the book is about.
Step number four, skim through the book. Read a few paragraphs here and there to get a sense
of the author’s style and purpose.
Also, go to the end of the book, read the last few pages as most authors summarize the book at
the end.
Now some of you are not convinced this will help, so let me tell you why these steps are important
by sharing a story with you.
Now suppose for a moment that you know nothing about American history, and someone shares
with you a story about some low ranking colonial officer that served in the British colonial
forces in the 1750’s during the Seven Year’s War.
Your initial reaction will probably be one of disdain as you wonder: hmm, why would I
care about some lowly colonial officer who lived 300 years ago.
But as you get more of the story, you find out that the officer's name was,
some guy, named George Washington.
Now, without more information that is also rather meaningless.
Finally, you find out that this George Washington guy went on to lead the American army during the
war of independence from England, and he became America’s first President.
Now it all begins to make sense.
Do you see what I did?
I created context for you, which helped you learn the story better.
Without that context you would have forgotten the information, but with the context you
are more likely to remember it because you understand where it fits in with everything
else that is stored in your brain.
Its no different with works of nonfiction.
If you just start reading a book, like most of you currently do, your brain doesn’t
have any place to put the new information.
But your brain desperately wants to comprehend that information, so it starts working on
placing the new information into categories.
In effect, unless you provide some context for the new information you are asking your brain
to do double duty: one, to create new categories for the information and two, place that new
information into those new categories.
But it's worse than that, because in addition to adding two steps to the process,
your're creating categories that later on may not make any sense.
So you may have to forget bad categories and
learn better ones.
So by following these steps you will create context for what you are going to learn, which
will help you learn the material faster and better than you can do by just jumping in
and reading the assigned pages.
If you have any questions or would like me to talk on a topic that interests you, please
leave a comment below.
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