Skills Guide Content
Goal: Improve organization in study skills
Different techniques for structuring note typing and writing:
- strategic bolding
- indents/tabs
- arrows
- hard breaks
Learn and understand these skills and then ask your student to tell you which ones are working for them and which ones are brand new (and less easy) to use. Practice them for yourself so you understand how your brain has to switch modes between each of these techniques.
Activity from Planner
Structuring typed notes or giving shape to large amounts of text can help you organize your thoughts while also improving memory recall and making them easy to skim or scan later. It’s a win-win-win!
Typing tricks:
- Strategic bolding (like we did above)
- Indents or Tabs
- Arrows ←→
- Return vs Shift + Return (soft break)
Extended Activity
Structuring typed notes or giving shape to large amounts of text can help you organize your thoughts while also improving memory recall and making them easy to skim or scan later. It’s a win-win-win!
Here are some tricks you can use:
- Indents or tabs — Use the tab key or space over the same number of times for each line.
- Arrows ←→ — There are many ways to type arrows, which can vary based on the device you are using. A search on the internet can give you a variety of fancy arrows to type, but an easy go-to is using a combination of dashes with greater or less than symbols (ex: ->, <-, —>>, <<—)
- Hard breaks vs. soft breaks — A hard break is a standard return key. It often will give extra space below what you have typed. If you are typing a bulleted list, it starts a new bullet. Soft breaks are typed with shift+return, and they will not add any extra space or make a new bullet in a list.
- Strategic bolding — One of the best tricks is bolding parts of words. Your brain holds onto these differences and pays more attention to the words on the page.
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