By now, you’ve probably heard enough about study skills to make your head spin but depending on where you are in your medical school career, you may still be searching for the best techniques for you. One such technique – and one that surprisingly few medical students utilize – involves annotating your textbook. Here’s what you need to know about incorporating annotation into your next study session.
What is Annotation?
Annotation is the act of highlighting important terms and sentences and taking notes as you read through your textbook. Some students highlight and write directly in the physical textbook, but others, hoping to resell the textbook later, choose to use a piece of paper or sticky notes inside the book, instead. Annotation is a great way for you to combine information from lectures and other sources with the information in your textbook to provide a well-rounded and thorough study guide.
How Should You Annotate?
It’s easy to get carried away when you annotate because everything in a medical textbook seems incredibly important. Fortunately, there are a few simple tips you can follow to help you start annotating like a pro:
- Skim the reading assignment in its entirety first. Don’t touch the pen, pencil, or highlighter yet. Just skim the text, paying special attention to subheadings, diagrams, and summaries.
- Pick up a highlighter and find the main point of the first paragraph. You don’t have to read it word-for-word; a quick skim will do. Highlight the paragraph’s main topic (or, if you don’t want to write in your book, use a sticky flag with a number on it, then on a separate piece of paper, write the corresponding number and the passage that constitutes the paragraph’s main topic.
- Look for important supporting details. Now that you have the main topic, look for any supporting details. For instance, if you’re learning about diabetes, and that is the main topic of the paragraph, you may need to know that insulin is a common treatment. Using the same highlighter, underline only important information that supports the main topic of the paragraph.
- Highlight key words in a separate color. If you come across important terms or vocabulary words that are unfamiliar to you, highlight these in another color. Then, to help you remember them, write the terms and their definitions on a separate sheet of paper – or, better still, put each one on an index card with the term on the front and its definition on the back.
How to Use Your Annotated Textbook
By the time you’ve annotated all your reading assignments, you should be able to open your textbook to a specific chapter and point out every single main topic, which is ultimately the perfect study guide for that chapter. To study it, if your textbook has review questions at the end of each topic or chapter, try your best to answer them and refer to your highlights as needed to help. Make a note of the topics you struggle with, then pull those topics up in your question bank to continue to actively challenge yourself. This mix of active and passive learning is ideal for most students.
Annotating your textbook is a quick way to get the most out of your reading assignments without having to read and re-read every word of every chapter. Not only can it help you commit things to memory when it is done correctly, but it can also serve as a very good study guide for quizzes and exams.
