Read Non-Fiction Faster and Remember More

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you how I read and take notes on non-fiction books.  This method helps me read faster, retain more information, understand the topic better, and gives me notes to come back to later. 

How do you read nonfiction?  Do you read one page at a time starting at the beginning — the way you read fiction?  If so, you are probably doing it wrong.  I wish I could find the article that I read many years ago that changed my thinking on this.  Generally speaking, the point of fiction is to entertain and transport — to tell a story.  Also generally speaking, the point of non-fiction is to convince you of something, present a perspective, or educate you.  Now, in some cases, you WILL be reading non-fiction for enjoyment — like memoirs or history — in which case, use your best judgement and read how you want.  But AGAIN generally speaking, the purposes of fiction and non-fiction are different, so the way you approach them should also be different.  

re’s what you need to take away from non-fiction: who wrote it, the point the author was trying to make, the way that the author chose to make that point, and his/her best arguments or concepts.  When I’m reading fiction, because it’s generally for enjoyment, it doesn’t matter whether I retain the storyline or main characters.  But when I’m reading non-fiction, I would like to remember those basic takeaways that I just mentioned. So, I almost always take notes.  My notetaking app of choice is Evernote. I have lots of videos on how I use Evernote, but for the purposes of this video, I have a notebook called Books and Reading, which is where I capture notes for the books I read. 

Okay — there is the ideal way to take notes, which I’ll cover in a moment, and then there are some lazy ways, which I’ll share now.

Lazy Notes Method #1

Let’s say I’ve read kind of a throwaway book that was okay, but I don’t feel like I need to spend a ton of time summarizing it. In this case, I may just write a 2-3 sentence summary as my notes for the whole book. Or even lazier, I may just copy the summary from Amazon or an online review.  No need to spend a ton of time memorializing a book that didn’t have much to say to you. 

Lazy Notes Method #2

The other lazy way that I sometimes take notes is that I highlight passages as I’m reading and then just export those highlights into a note. This works particularly well for books I’ve read on a Kindle. I have a video on doing this if you are interested. Sometimes I’ll go a step farther and structure those passages as bullets under the chapter headings. Or sometimes I’ll just leave them as is. I definitely do this for textbooks where I have a ton of highlights.  Or if the book has particularly beautiful writing that I want to capture. 

Okay — so those are my 2 lazy methods. Now, let me tell you about my

Ideal Note Taking Method

There are a bunch of steps, which I will cover one at a time:

• Read a summary

• Research author
• Read introduction
• Write own summary
• Record book structure
• Skim and take notes/summarize chapters
• Export your highlights
• Review initial summary and revise
• Reread notes

Let’s take these one at a time. First,

Read a summary

This is the quickest task — should take less than 5 minutes. Read a summary of the book online — like on Amazon or the first paragraph of Wikipedia if it has an entry.  Make sure this is not a review — you don’t want to bias yourself before reading, nor a detailed summary (which is why you should only read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry). Just a quick paragraph on what this book is about. Next,

Research the author

This is also quick.  Don’t research like you are writing a biography. You just want to figure out what their education and credentials are, what they written before, and how their background might influence their argument.  For example, I read a book on our society’s relationship to money and found that the author was a philanthropic fundraiser.  She also pointed this out in the book, but it was crucial for me to know what her background was to understand how her perspective may be different than if she was -- say -- a financial adviser or a psychologist. Once you’ve done those 2 bits of background research, it’s time to 

Read the introduction

Sometimes a book doesn’t have an introduction in which case the first chapter generally provides this function. You can read this all the way through, but in my experience, introductions are usually made up of 2 parts — a humanizing personal anecdote and an actual introduction to the book.  The introduction part is what you are after.  Not bad to read the personal anecdote — it usually adds to the research that you already did on the author, but what you really want the author's explanation of what the book is about and how the book is structured.  Based on this info, you will now

Write a summary

Does this seem premature?  It shouldn’t be.  After reading the intro, you should be able to write 2-3 sentences on what the book will be about and what topics or arguments will be covered.  I find that writing the summary at this point helps me to ensure that I have gotten what I need from the introduction.  Now

Record the book structure

Authors have lots of decisions to make.  Potentially the most important decision is how they are going to structure their argument so that it has the most impact on the reader. This structure should not be a mystery, it should be obvious to help the reader navigate the book.  The book’s structure is made obvious by the use of chapter titles, headings, and subheadings. I record everything accessible to me in the table of contents. If the author decided to put subheadings in the TOC, great — I happily record those as well.  This gives me the best understanding of how the author will make his/her case.  Confession: I don’t love the busy work of retyping out the whole table of contents. This is one area where I almost always use a photo to text app.  I happen to like TextGrabber for this.  The character recognition is good, but not perfect, but I even if I have to do some light editing, it saves me time over retyping. I put in my own structure by using bullets under chapter headings for subcategories. Okay, now I’m ready to 

Skim and take notes/summarize chapters

So, you may be annoyed that we’ve done all of this work and we haven’t even started reading yet, right?  But I’m telling you, by doing all of this prep work, you already have a better sense of how the book is structured, the point the author will make, and how s/he will make it than if you had read the book cover to cover.  Okay — so now we are reading, but we don’t have to read that closely to get the gist of the section, do we?  I use the sections that are provided by the author in the form of subcategories and make notes for each. You are looking for main points and main arguments. Along with this will be explanations of studies, examples, and back up data. Some of which will be very interesting or important to your understanding. So, dip in and out of the text to get a sense of the point of the section and what data the author is using to support those assertions.  I can’t tell you how to skim exactly, but I tend to read diagonally looking for important pieces of info.  Another way is to read the first 2 sentences of every paragraph to determine whether the whole paragraph is worth reading.  For each section, I write a summary (if needed — sometimes the title of the section is enough) and any pieces of interesting data that I’ve picked up from the section.  Then I move to the next. This should be faster than reading every word.  To give you a sense, I read fiction for enjoyment approximately one minute per page. So, under 60 pages an hour. Non-fiction is generally denser and less enjoyable reading, so it takes me longer — maybe 40 pages per hour. Using this structured skim technique, I can skim and take notes on about 90 pages per hour if I’m really concentrating.  Plus I retain a lot more afterwards. Obviously, some books you’ll want to read more slowly.  And some books you can just fly through.  It really depends on how you want to engage with the information.  As you go, highlight passages that are particularly interesting or well-said.  When you are finished, feel free to

Export your highlights

and paste them either at the bottom of your notes or, if you are particularly ambitious, you can insert them into the relevant sections of your notes.  Okay —once you’ve completed the book, go back and

Revise Your Initial Summary

Remember that summary that you wrote after the introduction?  Now that you’ve skimmed/read the whole book, go back and revise that summary if you need to. Most of the time, you’ll be surprised to find that you don’t need to revise it.  Just reading the introduction gave you enough information to write a fairly robust summary of the book. And finally,

Reread your notes

You don't need to do this right away.  After all, you’re probably sick and tired of the topic at this point. But in a week or two, go back and read through your notes. It will help with your memory retention and help to cement those concepts in your brain. 

This may seem like a ridiculously long process to you, but for me it dramatically increases the speed with which I can read non-fiction, helps me understand the author’s points and intentions better, and gives me a set of notes that I can consult later on this topic. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!