How to Study

Make Study Habit-Forming
If you’re doing poorly in school even while putting in a reasonable
amount of study time, you’ve got poor study habits. Who knows
where or when you acquired them, but failure has, to some extent,
become a habit.
Good news! Not only can bad habits be broken, but they can be
replaced by good habits relatively easily. Here’s your battle plan:
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It is much easier to replace a habit than to break it entirely. 
So don’t attempt to stop poor study habits— just learn the
good ones to substitute for them. 
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Practice, practice, practice. Practice is the motor oil that 
lubricates any habit’s engine. The more you do something, 
the more ingrained it becomes. 
How to Study
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Tell your friends and family of your decision to improve your
study skills and do better in school. (This is a trick that works
for some people, who find that the added pressure is a good
motivator.) 
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For others, however, such a strategy simply adds too much
pressure and is more likely to backfire instead, encouraging
failure. My advice would be to use such a strategy if you know
it will help you, but avoid it if you know it will actually hurt. 
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You don’t have to grind it out from Ds to As with no feedback.
To make sure you get a “motivational jolt” from every accom-
plishment, resolve to chart every inch of your progress, even
if, like Robert Frost, you have “miles to go before you sleep.”
You may want to set up a chart on your wall on which you list
“Today’s Successes” every day. And remember the small steps
you’re taking—saving five minutes on a reading assignment,
finding the books you need at the library more quickly, feeling
that you took good notes in a lecture, raising your hand to
actually answer a professor’s question in a class discussion,
and so on. 
Starting with the next chapter, everything in this book will concen-
trate on specific strategies useful for specific tasks—paper writing,
note taking, test taking, reading, and so forth. So this is probably the
best place to discuss some overall study strategies that have little to
do with any particular task but everything to do with your eventual
study success.