Remember Everything You Read: The Evelyn Wood 7-Day Speed Reading \& Learning Program pdfdrive com

The pictorial pattern.
Visually oriented people often have a lot of fun
taking notes pictorially because the main idea is to draw a picture that
represents the pertinent subject matter.
As you can see from the accompanying samples, a table might be used
for a book or article called “How to Build a Table in Four Steps.” Or a
baseball bat may be appropriate for material that deals with hitting
techniques.
A major advantage of pictorial patterns is that they are often very
memorable. Try using this approach in your next note-taking effort, and
see if the concepts aren’t fixed more firmly in your mind after you put
your books and notes away.

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On the other hand, some people find it hard to come up with a good
picture, and they seem to spend more time agonizing over their drawing
than they do on the underlying subject matter. There may also be a
tendency to make the picture too complicated—and complexity in this
type of recall pattern will make note-taking much harder to do or
remember.
In addition, you may come across important items in your reading that
don’t relate to the picture you’ve chosen. For example, suppose you’re
reading a book on Freudian psychology, and so you draw a picture of a
person’s head as your main note-taking focus.
But then the author shifts to a discussion of another psychological
school. In that case, you might have to draw another pictorial recall
pattern. Or it might have been advisable to use just one slash recall
pattern for the entire reading assignment.
The random pattern.
I’ve omitted a diagram of this approach because
it’s hard to include one general model or sample that’s applicable in
most situations. The main idea here is both to jot down facts, ideas and
concepts at random, and to try to group them as you write in a way that
imposes some sort of order on the whole.
In other words, suppose you’re trying to draft a master recall pattern
for an entire American literature course. In such a case, you might put
Hawthorne in one corner of the paper, Poe in another corner,
Hemingway in another part and so on.
Then, when you’ve recorded all your main topics, you might try
relating them to one another with explanatory connecting lines. Or you
might doodle for a while on this initial random pattern and eventually
finalize your thoughts in a second draft.
The random pattern works best with extremely disorganized material
or in situations where the student is trying to impose a single set of
themes that weren’t present or were unclear in the original notes. It may
be just the tool to use when you need to impose order and relate
disparate topics that have been covered in a course.
These are some of the most popular and efficient recall patterns that

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we’ve discovered in our research. But you may want to try something
more creative. For example, you might use a combination of two or
more of these patterns on a given assignment. Or you may even come up
with completely different approaches that work better for your special
needs.
If you’re just beginning with the recall pattern concept, however, I’d
suggest that you try the slash recall pattern first. To get some practice
with this type of note-taking, preview the next chapter. Then close the
book and draw a slash recall. Finally, read the chapter and add new
information, as appropriate, to your original recall pattern.